I thought i would post a most recent e-mail received via this great board, from Laserman in regards to the situation he was having and the solution to his foaming problem.  So, sorry Ken for your blindsided slap.

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Any true air-flow; high-velocity CFM system is going to naturally--mix Air with Water, and the residues that it recovers--and therefore, it sometimes may have more of a tendency to cause these incoming residues/soaps to form as foam and rinse above the level of the water recovered. And since foam is a lot lighter than water and because of the extremely air-flow in the recovery tank, it could be more of a common senerio under certain and particular situations and thus vacuumed thru the vacuum motors. (But, not always, btw)

 

HOWEVER, this is dependent largely upon the particular cleaning agents being used, as you had allutted to, or what was already left behind in the carpet fibers. And, this will largely be dependent on whether the Operator is required to use defoamer, or not. (Keeping in mind that not all defoamers are the same based on quality concentrations, etc..)

 

Keep in mind that cleaning deep into the carpet fibers and achieving total and through extraction (hopefully) is everyones goal. At least it should be in this business! Therefore, on less efficient machines, or those generic machines with less vacuum are less prevelant at times to capture the amount of residue(s) that a true High-Performance system would.

 

I also believe that we must keep in mind that foaming is not only created from SOAP left in carpets but also we must consider this same problem (if we let it become one, btw...) whenever we clean a hard floor. The incoming water will really Slam into that recovery tank and must be calmed down at times with a good grade defoamer.

 

Hope that helps answer your question.

 

Ed Valentine

 

His problem from day one was: Foaming.

 

He  called me approx 5-6 weeks ago, and told me "Problem solved".

 

He had a special defoamer device installled on the vacuum port inlet of his machine and told me that he placed a pail behind the vacuum exhaust so that he could run a test and see if any foam was being blown out. He checked this about every 5 mins just to make sure [!!] when he was using the machine on the job site. And, he found that ---not one drop---of foam was being blown out. "Problem solved"!!! Now, he stated that he was happy.

 

3-4 weeks later he called me and stated that the defoamer was too expensive and he was going broke buying it from his Supplier. I mentioned to him that I did not sell him the defoamer; there are different concentrations of defoamers; and so on.

 

Now if the machine (in his words, written on May 13th btw) "I've said it before, I know the machine is AWESOME, cleans great, dries fast, etc..if I could just solve this problem".,

 

 

Don't know unfortunately, what to do beyond the efforts we have put into this situation. Sent him a new air-deflector/ CFM lid also, to no avail.

 

The very best to all and especially to Barry. I hope he solves his problem but his problem is not with his machine or how it was built.

 

Ed Valentine