If you're looking for “how to clean car upholstery?” You will need one of the following scenarios:
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- Thorough vacuuming
- Spot cleaning
- Fabric upholsteries clean up
- Vinyl upholsteries clean up
- Leather upholsteries clean up
- Professional detailers
- Mess prevention
Maintaining a clean vehicle interior helps protect the interior and prevent major repair costs due to premature tear and wear. It also improves your vehicle's safety and increases its value.
Depending on what you're dealing with and your goals, there are plenty of ways to clean up your vehicle's interior. It also is very important to understand what type of products are suitable for cleaning your car upholstery depending on its material. For example, what works for fabric upholstery does not necessarily work for leather upholstery.
This article provides you with seven different scenarios and explains experts’ recommendations to clean your car upholstery.
Why is it important to keep your car's upholstery clean?
Before we dig into the details about “how to clean car upholstery?” It is critical to understand the main benefits that we will get from cleaning our vehicles upholstery. While we all know that having a clean interior provide us with a better healthy environment, there are additional benefits that you will gain as well:
- Eliminates tear and wear
One of the first benefits of keeping a healthy, clean interior is to protect the vehicle from premature tear and wear. Typically, if there are a lot of stains and other greases sitting on the vehicle’s interior, there's a very high chance that the surfaces can peel off, impacting the quality of your vehicle’s interior, which gets worse over time.
- Protect your health
Keeping a clean interior is extremely important for people with health issues. For example, suppose you're driving other passengers or have respiratory issues. In that case, it's very important for you to always have a clean interior to prevent inhaling dust or other substances that could impact your health. In addition, cleaning your vehicle becomes a more important job for people with different allergies who can't get impacted by any amount of dust on the vehicle.
- Improve vehicle safety
When your vehicle's windows and mirrors are clean, you can easily see the road around you. Therefore, you eliminate and prevent any safety troubles due to improper visibility. Thus, not only is it important to keep the exterior of your vehicle important, but also you must have the windows and other components cleaned from the inside.
- Get rid of Major stains
When your vehicle is continuously dirty, there's a very high chance that stains can build up and become more aggressive, making it very hard to take them out. Therefore, maintaining a proper regular clean-up helps eliminate any dirt without requiring expensive material or harsh chemicals.
- Maintain your vehicle's value
When a potential buyer comes inside your vehicle and sees a very clean interior, there's a very high chance that this buyer will pay whatever you're asking for. However, if all the buyers see it is just a bunch of garbage and other dirt around the furniture, he will most likely understand that you've not been taking good care of your vehicle, which means that there are a lot of things that could be hidden underneath the hood as well.
- Extend the lifetime of the upholstery
When cleaning the upholstery regularly, you don't have to deal with harsh chemicals to remove old stains, which means that you have a chance to an external lifetime of the policy without needing major replacement.
- Prevent weird odors
If you don't like to drive a vehicle that has food smell or other pets’ smells, cleaning your vehicle regularly helps eliminate any desirable smell and maintain a fresh smell all the time.
How to clean car upholstery?
Now we have a good idea about the main benefits you'll get from cleaning your upholstery; the next step is understanding how to clean your upholstery safely without causing damages. Selecting the right approach is extremely important, especially if you are driving a vehicle that has a luxury interior or some leather interior that harsh chemicals might impact.
Let's take a closer look at the seven following scenarios on how to clean your upholstery?
- Thorough vacuuming
One of the most common ways of cleaning up your vehicle's interior is using quick vacuuming car doesn't have major stains; you don't simply need to apply any chemicals or even water to keep a clean interior.
There are plenty of available car vacuums that you can either purchase or use at a shop vac to remove any dirt from your car. They have very long cords allowing the vacuums to reach areas you can't access using your hand.
There are plenty of plastic attachments that come with most car vacuums that you can utilize to reach inaccessible areas and get rid of any small dirt or debris you can't reach.
As you're vacuuming your car, consider removing any move all seats and take out the kid’s car seats to reach underneath them and remove food leftovers before it becomes severe stains.
Also, remove the floor mats and vacuum them and vacuum underneath the maps to ensure that you took out any unnecessary dirt or debris that made its way to the vehicle.
When vacuuming your car, you must make it a habit and clean it up regularly to prevent dealing with difficult things that require vehicle detailing. Vacuuming your car is one of the cheapest ways to clean up your vehicle, and when it comes to vehicle detailing, it becomes very pricey. Many drivers might not be able to afford it regularly.
- Spot cleaning
In many situations, you might just be looking to clean certain spots because of food spills or kids dropping something. For that, you will need first to Test any products you were planning to use.
That's why I, you don't immediately apply the cleaning chemical or product directly at the spot. Instead, you should apply it somewhere hidden that's not obvious and in A very small area.
In some instances, the spots might require a certain pretreatment, which means that you must apply the remover for a couple of minutes before you start scrubbing or wiping it off.
If you're dealing with ink stains, you can use a mixture of Hairspray, water, and rubbing alcohol. But, again, it's very critical that you never attempt to spread the ink to the surrounding areas and just carefully wipe it off with the mixture.
On the other hand, if you're dealing with oily or greasy stains, some experts recommend using either food grease or probably lipsticks and a cotton cloth. Once you finish cleaning the area, add a sprinkle of salt and let it stay overnight before vacuuming it the next morning.
When dealing with coffee stains, on the other hand, you can easily use cold water and a small clean paper towel. Some customers used glass cleaner on the coffee stain and allowed it set for at least 5 minutes before wiping it off with a dry paper towel and got successful results.
If you're dealing with vomit stains for any reason, you need first to remove any vomit remaining while making sure that you're wearing gloves and taking out any large particles. Then, you can dilute some cold water to wash the area. Using baking soda and toothpaste can also help you achieve clean results while taking care of any remaining odors.
Finally, when dealing with bloodstains, you can use hot water with soap. Apply the hot water and soap on a microfiber cloth, and then dump the bloodstain with the cloth until you get rid of it.
- Fabric upholsteries clean up
Although you might be dealing with spot cleaning most of the time, there are instances where you must perform a thorough clean-up of your entire upholstery. The clean-up process differs significantly depending on the type of material dealt with.
- To clean a fabric upholstery, you can use one of the following recommendations:
- Try a specific cleaner made for upholstery cleaning. It's typically called an all-purpose upholstery cleaner.
- Use a mixture of Borax, however, and soap
- Try a commercial upholstery cleaner
- Clean your fabric upholstery using a steam cleaner. You don't have to purchase it, and you can just rent it for a day or so.
- Clean small areas using a toothbrush
- Clean the floor mats outside the vehicle and allow them to dry thoroughly. Depending on the matte type, you might only be able to use wax Polish or certain products.
- Test a sticky paper grab using a lint roller
- Vinyl upholsteries clean up
On the other hand, if your vehicle's upholstery is made of Vinyl, you might need to use different procedure and different products that are made purposely for Vinyl, which includes:
- Try a vanilla upholstery glass cleaner
- Clean the pulse using a mixture of water and baking soda
- Remove any dirt from the seams using a toothbrush
- Take out the floor mats and clean them up using either an all-purpose upholstery cleaner or a mixture of dishwashing soap and water
- Leather upholsteries clean up
Since leather can get damaged very easily from any harsh cleaning, you must be extremely careful about what products use and how to clean the leather upholstery. Try one of the following recommendations:
- Check out the commercial leather cleaning kits
- Make it easy to clean up the interior of your vehicles of the whole street by turning on the heating system and allowing grease to get out easily.
- Use leather conditioners to pretreat any harsh stains
- Consider a specific leather cleaner and test it on hidden areas before applying it to the entire upholstery.
- Use mild hand soap and water to wash the upholstery. However, it's important to consult your vehicles owner’s manual to get an idea about what type of soap you can apply to your vehicle's leather
- Dry out your leather completely whenever you apply any conditioner because you don't want to leave any residue that could damage the leather
- Consider choosing the right leather conditioner that is water-based and pH-neutral to prevent damaging the leather
- Clean the seams using a small toothbrush
- Take out the floor mats and clean them out with the same approach that we indicated before using a mixture of dishwashing liquid and water
- Professional detailers
You might get to a point where your vehicle's stains are very harsh, and it's not easy to take them out; at that point, it might be worth investing in a professional detailer. But, again, there are plenty of available services around your area that might differ in prices depending on the hourly rate of their employee.
Therefore, we recommend that you do thorough research about which services to consider that don't break your budget but at the same time provide you with the necessary clean-up.
- Mess prevention
Finally, the easiest way to keep your vehicle clean is to prevent making it dirty in the first place. In other words, it might be worth investing in some components and accessories to keep your vehicle clean and prevent spills. For instance, you might want to install some kids' seat covers or probably small baskets around the kids to remove dirt or prevent spills from reaching your vehicle's upholstery.
Conclusion
Maintaining clean upholstery is essential to increase your car's value and prevent premature tear and wear that could cost you a lot of money down the road. This article provided you with seven different scenarios that you might be looking for when it comes to cleaning car upholstery.
You must review your vehicle's owner's manual to understand what chemicals you can apply on the upholstery to prevent damaging them and require thousands of dollars in repairs, especially if you're driving a luxury car.
Keep in mind that no matter how much you spend in maintaining your vehicle's interior, if the car has major mechanical problems, it might not be worth your effort to clean the interior. In other words, if your car has significant issues in the engine or the transition, you might want to sell the vehicle and use its money to buy a better car that has cleaned upholstery already.
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