A piece of carpet installed in a bedroom mysteriously lost yarn from two spots next to each other. The yarn was completely gone; no sign of it in the backing or anywhere else, as if it had vanished into thin air. The dealer was at a loss as to the cause. He did tell us that one of the kids had vomited on the carpet and the homeowner had used Resolve to clean the carpet. Neither the vomit nor the Resolve should have caused the yarn to disappear. The consumer wasn’t filing a claim they just wanted his help because these spots just appeared, they said, out of the blue.
The dealer replaced the affected section of the carpet and sent it to us to see if we could determine what happened. When the piece arrived and was examined we could see the yarn loss was clean, no latex residue and no yarn bundle left in the primary backing at all. Yarn at the perimeter of the bald spots had some fraying. There was a slight odor to the carpet but not offensive and there was staining on the back of the carpet. We knew from this evidence that something had affected the carpet as he said. There was however no weaknesses in the laminate strength or tuft bind of the carpet outside of the missing yarn areas even though a larger section of backing was stained.
The sample was taken to the lab where it was examined under a Macbeth light with the UV setting on. There was some fluorescing of the backing, indicating a foreign substance residue but no heavy concentration was indicated. When our lab manager walked out and saw me playing with the carpet he asked what I was doing. When I told him he said the dog did it. Flabbergasted, I asked him why he thought so. He said, “I’ve seen this several times before.” He said the dog will dig at the spot where the vomit was for whatever reason (We’ll have to ask the Dog Whisperer why) and this activity will pull the yarns out of the carpet. This explained the frayed and untwisted yarns at the edges of the bald spots.
When I called the dealer back to ask them if this customer had a dog he said in fact they did. This corroborated the evidence and our lab manager’s conclusion. Nothing in carpet manufacture would cause the completely clean loss of yarn like this. If the area were defective and weak the vacuum cleaner would have long ago pulled the yarn out. The fact that the yarn disappeared so quickly and without warning also verifies the damage was also caused quickly and aggressively. The fact that the carpet face was so thick, the yarn so twisted and the color so camouflaging, hid the fact that the pulled yarns may have been laying on the surface of the carpet unnoticed.
The solution to this mystery came as a relief to the dealer and his customer. I was intrigued and fascinated by it. Even after almost 40 years in the business we see things we’ve never seen before. This is one of the reasons I’m still passionate about the business and in love with it. And, to brag a bit, we have never had a problem presented to us, no matter how big or small, simple or complex, that we didn’t find the cause.
Author: Lewis G. Migliore
LGM and Associates – The Floorcovering Experts