Why I No Longer Use An Extractor (Big Update)

Top 12 tools & products for under $500:

Products & Tools Used Here:

TimeCodes:
0:00 - Intro
0:55 - Small & cheap extractors
2:21 - Aqua pro vac
4:33 - Mytee lite 8070 heated carpet extractor
6:25 - Rigid shop vac extractor

Disclaimer:
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[Dgilman]

This is incredible!! I was about to drop $1200 on a Mytee extractor (sorry Mytee) and now I can save $1000 and some space just using the RipClean set up. Thank YOUU!

[scott]

And what’s the point of the wet vac filter? When I’m running my shop vac for wet applications, I just remove the filter. Never have had a problem.

[Collinormous]

I'm just a hobbyist but I had the realization the other day I could use a wet/dry vac as an extractor - glad to see there's already kits for it

[Timsautosolutions]

Ive had the bissel & vac master but NOW use my rigid vac with a kit i built with the detail king head, rigid orange hose, and braide poly tube with fittings! I LOVE IT!

[JamesDBuzzard]

I started my business with NO EXTRACTOR and have not needed one yet! I have not had a detail yet that I can not handle with a steamer and vacuum. If I over saturate something I can just use my vac to suck out the water and chem, steam, mop with a towel and I'm done.

I have everything I need for the DIY Extractor but haven't needed to put it together 🤷🏽‍♂️

[yaboymagic]

I’m glad Nashville is a big city I’ve been detailing here a while and never heard of this guy. Guess it’s true what they say there’s enough food for everyone. Keep up the good work my guy

[TheFunTokenFamily]

I have a question, with out the exactor head just the wet vac; would you get the same results.

Idea for cleaning area rugs:

Spray down with hose
Lay down solution
Hit it with drill brush
Pressure wash
Do that sweet squeegee thing
Repeat that how ever many times you need maybe with hot water if need be
Then clean it up with the wet vac.

Or should I also be wet vacuuming between one of those mentioned steps ????

Please help thank you !

[jakeramos]

I legit just went through the same thought process as you Luke, my Ripclean hose just delivered today!

[dannymisiura]

So glad you made these videos when you did. I was in the market for an extractor and was able to purchase this build-your own-extractor last week.🎉
Great videos bro!!

[marctrainor]

Thank you for being so upfront and honest here. I have one of the Rigid shop vacs and I think it's even more powerful suction than my "fancy", expensive Desiderio combo steamer, vacuum, and extractor. I love the wand you get with the Rip clean and it all just makes sense. I might, even try and hook it up to my water heater, but if not, I'll just use the garden hose. Thanks for another primo video. Marc T.

[sterlingjones]

On this one I have to agree with Pan the Organizer for the Bissell, it is great.

[garluis]

So you do still use an extractor, just a diy one

[Cleaning_Hero]

I’d like to see the CFM and inches of water-lift numbers for the vacuums. The best dry-only vacs have 110” - 120” of water lift (suction), and 85 CFM - 130 CFM in airflow. If you get high enough suction, you can buy air-driven turbo tools that have a brush roll that spins to help grab embedded dirt.

[bat__bat]

Pro Cleaner Tips: Great vid! but you're too kind to the Bissell and such extractor machines. I used a truck mount for 25 + yrs. Those Bissell, hoover, dirt devil wannabe extractor systems are toys. I wouldn't use one if I got it for free. Mytee is a lower end brand in the industry, but they have a niche with hard-plastic products that are more affordable than traditional stuff, but I've definitely paid the consequences of using one of their cheaper tools before. That mytee machine is rated as a portable for carpet cleaning. Like you said, it's just a glorified vacuum with wannabe complicated tanks and valves so as to feel like a real carpet cleaning machine. It's just a bigger toy. It's still limited by the wall outlet. You can't clean house carpet with a machine that plugs in the wall. But you CAN do automobile carpet and upholstery (and house upholstery) with a vacuum that maxes out your typical wall outlet (15amps) and that Rigid is fine for that job. Your rigid DIY tips are great, but can easily be much more so I'll throw some tips for viewers looking for ideas to cheaply improve their capabilities. For water pressure, you don't need much for upholstery at all. Normal garden hose pressure is enough to do a car and also indoor upholstery like a sofa or recliner. Home Depot and Amazon have a blowout winterizer fitting they call it that adapts your garden hose/water spigot threads to 1/4 inch male quick connect for air or water. At Home Depot it's a Husky brand product in the section by the air compressor fittings. Using that adapter, all you'd need to do is run the adapted garden hose to a 1/4 in female quick connect that's on your extractor tool whip. You might find an adapter with opposite sex, then just change the fitting on your extractor whip accordingly. Then when you turn on the water spigot, you have adequate water pressure to clean with, just pull the extractor tool trigger and it will spray nicely. You can adjust pressure by turning the spigot, OR, get a needle valve from Amazon for $10 or less and add that inline behind the quick connect on the extractor tool whip. This will allow you to fine tune water pressure at the tool so you can just crank the spigot up all the way and forget about it. For vacuum: Check out the dust separator cyclone vacuum things on Amazon. It's a baffle that goes in-line with your vacuum. Delmar has one on Amazon that is designed to fit on top of a 5 gal bucket. Run your shop vac to the bucket, then run vacuum hose from the bucket to your extractor tool. Now your waste water and debris goes in the bucket instead of your vacuum. Game changer. Much faster to unhook and dump the bucket, plus it allows you to separate dry vacuum trash from dirty water. Trust me you want these separated. Otherwise you'll have to pour the wastewater through a mesh/net bag to strain the trash out later. You can dump dirty extractor water right back on the customer's lawn, or your own lawn, but not if it's got a bunch of trash in it. So the dry debris can go in the vacuum's tank and the dirty water can fill the bucket. Or use two buckets. Dry vac the car first with bucket A, then switch to bucket B when u go to water extraction. Bring trash bags for emptying the dry debris. Leave it in the customer's trash if u want. Using two buckets makes maintenance on the vacuum and filter non-existent since you'll never actually have trash go into your vacuum and it also doesn't matter if your vacuum has a small tank. I highly recommend this since stacking buckets is space saving and cheap while traveling. And here's a hack... You can find vacuum hose fittings usually by looking for 'dust collector' stuff. Get a vacuum 3 way splitter Y or Tee that fits your shop vac (usually 1.25 or 1.5 in) or make one out of pvc pipe. Now you can hook TWO shop vacs to your waste bucket for double the suction. You still have the one vacuum hose to your tool and you work the same exact way, but you'll have double the vacuum power collecting into the same bucket. But you'll need to run one vacuum machine on a separate circuit, so bring an extra extension cord and plug into a separate room's outlet. Or, get a 2000+ watt 12v to 120v inverter for your car. Hooking it up is like installing car audio so it's not hard, but if you're not very handy you might get Best Buy to install an inverter for you if you buy it and bring it to them with your car. You'll then maybe need an extra 12v battery to work in parallel with your car's OEM battery to help sustain all the electrical loads, but you won't need a bigger alternator. It costs a few dollars for that set up but then you'll be completely independent for electric needs if that's useful to you as a mobile detailer. While you're at it, tap into the vehicle oil system and add a plate heat exchanger for an infinite hot water source. Just find an oil filter sandwich adapter that matches your vehicle's oil filter threads, or use adapters to force a fit. That will provide you with In/Out function to your hot oil system. Don't need a pump, thermostat, bypass, valves, nothing. It's extremely simple. Just run the in/out oil feed to a plate heat exchanger you can easily mount under the car or in the cargo area of a work truck or van. Then run hoses from the plate heat exchanger to somewhere accessible in or under the car. Either hose acts as cold water in and the other will act as hot water out. If you can't tap the oil system, try tapping into the upper radiator hose or heater core and use the same exact plate heat exchanger setup with engine coolant as the heating medium. You'll of course need your engine running in park while you work to sustain heat and/or run electricity to your vacuum(s). You might also try buying a pool filter aka hydro filter. These are about $100 and sit inline with the vacuum. It might require vacuum adapter fittings to fit onto your vacuum hose setup. It's an airtight canister that holds a large metal/mesh filter a little bit bigger than the canister at a bank drive thru. It will catch all the hair and trash but will allow dirty water to pass on through to the tank. This way you can dry vac and switch to wet extraction without having to mess with anything. The pool filter thing is easy to empty when you feel your vacuum getting weak. Just gotta unscrew the top, pull out the full filter, empty the full filter into a trash bag, rinse out the sand and dirt from the threads on the canister top and the mesh on the filter, then replace the filter and screw on the canister top. Takes a couple minutes. For other ways to get hot water if tapping into your car is not possible: bring an electric kettle. Boil water and fill a pump sprayer. Use that boiling water sprayer to rinse with. Add an acidic rinse like matrix or prochem all fiber rinse to that hot water to assist in flushing stronger, higher pH pre-sprays. Harbor freight has the Bauer cordless pump sprayer so you don't even have to pump anymore. Amazon has quite a few cordless pump sprayer offerings as well. If you have shop air (air compressor) you can turn any regular hand pump sprayer into an automatic sprayer. Just drill a hole in the top area and add a bulkhead fitting. Or get a sprayer that already has two holes in the top. They all have one hole for the hose in the top, but some models now have a second hole for a pressure release valve. Just yank that crap off and use the extra hole to add a 1/4 inch quick connect fitting for the shop air. You can add a needle valve to fine tune the pressure if need be. Or bring a microwave with you. For dash and hard surfaces, wet a towel and microwave it for a couple minutes, then use it on all the surfaces without any soap or cleaners. That boiling hot towel should get everything up, even old coca cola syrup. For the cloth and carpet, wet a terry or microfiber bonnet pretty good and throw it in the microwave for a couple minutes. Using proper gloves, grab the boiling hot bonnet and put it on your DA polisher or drill/rotary backing plate and spin it on the pre-sprayed carpet or upholstery you're cleaning. Bring plenty bonnets if this is your method, as they'll quickly turn brown and black with filth. Most high end detailers are going with this method and using VLM / encapsulation chemicals as prespray on the carpet or upholstery. You can get these chemicals from jondon or Amazon from brands like prochem, Chemspec, and matrix. All these brands make presprays and rinses. For extraction, use higher pH prespray and rinse with acidic all fiber rinse in your water. For rotary or DA cleaning, known as VLM, use the encapsulation chemicals or specific vlm detergents from those brands. The DA or rotary tool can absorb the encapsulated dirt with bonnets or pads that you then clean later in your washing machine. This method is much more dry and allows u to give the car back quicker without drying it for long periods, but as you can imagine it won't work on super dirty cars. Higher end customers don't have much dirt and they'll have leather seats too, so you'll use extractors much less and DA more which is great when u can, or when you're doing a follow-up on a car u already recently used water extraction on. Bring both systems, but only use the extractor if VLM method isn't cutting it. Play around with whatever method works best.

[jtraveny]

back years ago in the late 90s early 2000s our local store had an old rince n vac as its rental carpet cleaner

[Schetmesa]

Great video, I've seen small steam cleaners, can I use those for small stains and then vacuum?

[NightRaven]

I was just thinking about doing this since I have the same Rigid wet / dry vac, except I have the 4.5 gal and I love it! Thanks so much for the extractor attachment link! :)

[OscarMonreal-im]

what steam/extractor would you recommend for a mattress cleaning business? something good and reliable.

[crpth]

Not a professional car detailer by any stretch of the imagination. Which means that my "best bang for the buck" is a regular wet & dry vacuum. Model, Nilfisk Multi 20, with a Bissel extractor head. The liquid, usually regular tap hot water, comes from an excellent Gardena sprayer. In use the set is kind of bulky. But surprisingly efficient and did I say inexpensive... ;-)

With that said on my particular scenario I couldn't imagine myself buying thousands in equipment to do the exact same thing I'm doing now. If I was a pro. Yeah, it would make sense. For private use, no way. both pieces of equipment double into their normal functions and duties when not in "extractor mode"!

[platinumare]

If you have time. I am a little confused. I need an extractor for an extremely filthy car - think soiling equivalent to a hoarders house. Where the upholstery has multiple old deep disgusting stains. Which one would you advise as best for these situations?