Hand Sanitizer Tips and Precautions

Current circumstances have caused many people to increase their supplies of products like bottled water, face masks, toilet paper, and hand sanitizer. Now there’s not a lot of worries if you spill bottled water, face masks or toilet paper on your carpet – water merely needs a towel to soak it up, face masks merely need hands to pick them up, and rolls of toilet paper can be stacked in a safe location. (Note: using the toilet paper to clean up the spilled water will result in your cleanup efforts to backfiring. Try using cloth towels instead.)

Hand sanitizer is a little different. If the container gets ruptured or a cap comes off, the gel or liquid consistency allows the sanitizer to seep into your carpet pile. Since the product has more components then bottled water, it might prove disruptive. “But it’s a cleaning product – it couldn’t hurt the carpet that much, right?” Well, that’s true, but some hand sanitizers come with coloring or specialized ingredients (like alcohol) that won’t play nice with color or backing materials in your carpet, especially when left in place for an extended period. Therefore, it’s best to clean it up as soon as you can.

The Process

You’ll find the process very similar to cleaning up hand lotion. Start with the basics: carefully scrape up the excess sanitizer. Even though many hand sanitizers have a measure of alcohol in their makeup, take a small amount of isopropyl alcohol and apply it onto the stain using a cloth or paper towel. Be careful with the amount, as you don’t want to endanger your carpet backing. If the sanitizer had color in it, you might mix a quarter teaspoon of liquid detergent in a quart of water, then dab and blot from the outside inward until there’s no more color transference. Finally, rinse with a spray of water and use clean towels to soak up the rinse.

But Wait, There’s More

You can find many DIY tips on the internet today pointing to hand sanitizer as having wonderful bonus cleaning abilities. Because of its content of alcohol and other ingredients, hand sanitizer could be used as a substitute in household cleaning.

For instance, hand sanitizer helps to break down the glue used with sticky labels. It can also clean and disinfect household surfaces like sinks, faucets, and countertops, much like it does your hands. If you have scuff marks on your shoes, hand sanitizers can disintegrate the marks while leaving your shoes intact. It can also disinfect ingrown hairs and nails, and some people claim it will work as a last-resort replacement for underarm deodorant. Well, we’ll take their word for it on that one.

A Word of Caution

On the other hand, there are claims that hand sanitizer can remove ink and permanent marker stains from your carpet. Preferred Carpet Care does not endorse or recommend this Do-It-Yourself treatment. While it might have an effect, hand sanitizer often makes matters worse by smearing the stain further or reacting to the ink in unpredictable ways. If you have a stain on your carpet from permanent ink or markers, please call Preferred Carpet Care to discuss the issue. We will have more tried and true recommendations to deal with the stain until we can thoroughly remove it for you. Please give us a call at (530) 243-8400 or schedule a free consultation here on our website. Despite the possible versatility of hand sanitizer, Preferred Carpet Care is a much more reliable resource when it comes to spot cleaning.