The thing about tomato sauce is that not only is it a hard stain to get out – it also gets spilled on the carpet at the worst time – during dinner after a long hard day of work. That is why tomato stains are sometimes the worst stains to get out of a carpet. As well, you also have to start working on the stain right away or it may be permanent. So when someone spills red marinara sauce on your beige carpet, here are some steps you can follow to start removing tomato sauce stains from your carpet right away:
Step #1: Before you do anything else, blot up as much of the sauce as possible with clean white paper towels or rags. Do not rub the stain! This is the biggest mistake people make when removing tomato sauce stains from carpet. You want to use the paper towels or rags to draw the sauce carefully out of the carpet until you have as much of it up as possible. Also, have someone help you gather up as many clean paper or cloth towels as possible. You may need many, depending on the size of the spill. Try not to reuse the towels if at all possible, or you may do more harm spreading the spill than good.
Step #2: Take a wet paper towel or rag and soak it in cool water. Go over the spill again. This time you will draw out some of the stain that is deeper into the pile. Be careful to draw the stain out and not push it down further. The key here is to get a much of the tomato sauce out of the carpet as possible so that the stain remover you will use will go right onto the carpet fibers. You want to apply stain remover right onto the carpet fibers, not on the sauce itself. Applying stain remover to the sauce itself will break it up further and make it spread further throughout the carpet.
Step#3: Take another clean rag or paper towel and put either lemon juice, hydrogen peroxide, or white vinegar on it and begin dabbing at the stain. This will start to break up the stain and should get most of it out.
Step #4: Flush the stain with cool water and see how much of it is gone. You can do this by soaking a paper towel in water and going over the stain gently. At some point, there should be no more sauce coming out of the carpet onto the towel. This is a far as you are going to get with this method, unless you want to keep repeating it until the stain is gone.
Step #5: At this point, if there is still a stain, you can use a commercial stain remover for carpets. Another mistake that people make when removing tomato sauce stains from their carpet is that they mop up the excess sauce and then go right for the commercial carpet cleaner and start rubbing. Using this type of ‘panic’ method will actually set the stain permanently and make it impossible to remove. The commercial stain remover does work, but only when the stain is mostly removed from the carpet with lemon juice or rubbing alcohol and not rubbed in.
