Portable Carpet Cleaning Equipment

A portable extractor earns its place on jobs a truckmount can't reach: high-rise apartments, shopping centre tenancies, aged care facilities, anywhere the hose run is too long or the vehicle can't get close enough. The trade-off has always been heat, vacuum and water capacity — and that gap has narrowed considerably.

This range runs from the SPOTX 3gal spot extractor through to the TractX 12gal dual-vacuum machines at 500 PSI, plus the Drago 1600 and Balboa 700 with auto-fill and auto pump-out.

Choosing a portable

Tank capacity determines how long you work between dumps. A 3gal spotter suits detailing, spot work and vehicle interiors. Anything approaching a full residential clean wants 12gal or more, and auto-fill with auto pump-out removes the bucket work entirely on larger jobs.

Pump pressure at 500 PSI handles general residential and commercial carpet. Higher pressure matters most on dense commercial loop and on hard surface work.

Vacuum configuration is what separates machines on drying times. Dual vacuum motors pull more water out of the pile, which means shorter dry times and fewer callbacks. Where a machine is running long hose, a vacuum booster such as the Vac Mate or KleenRite V-Boost recovers performance lost down the line.

Heat is worth adding if you clean commercial or heavily soiled residential work. An inline heater such as the Heat-Mate raises solution temperature at the wand rather than relying on tank heat alone.

Hose sets and wands are available packaged with new machines, along with spare parts to keep yours running. For hard surface work, see our tile and grout range.

Portables disappoint when they're asked to do a truckmount's job. An Australian power point gives you somewhere between 1.5 and 2 horsepower to work with. The smallest truckmount starts at 18. That gap is vacuum, and vacuum is what decides how much of the water your wand lays down actually comes back up. Whatever you don't recover stays in the carpet, and that's where long dry times and callbacks come from. Running two cords on separate circuits gets you to about 4. If the work has outgrown the circuit, the answer is a different class of machine, not a bigger portable.

Tip: the cost people forget is time. Manually filling and dumping eats hours, which is why auto-fill and auto pump-out pay back fastest for the operators who are busiest.