Should I Get a Rotary Extractor?
They sure do look cool. But what does a rotary extractor do that you can’t with a regular wand? Is it worth it for your business? Well, that all depends. We’ll cover some factors to consider below before you make a purchase.
What is a Rotary Exactly?
Despite having the word extractor in their name, these machines aren’t stand-alone extractors. They’re actually cleaning tools to be used with an extractor. All rotary extractors feature a spinning cleaning head with both jets and vacuum slots underneath, and some, like our T-Rex (pictured to the right) feature carpet brushes underneath for added agitation.
Each time a jet/vacuum pair goes over the carpet, it’s called a cleaning pass, equivalent to one stroke of a standard cleaning wand. The difference is the rotary will do the passes for you, and much much faster than you could do manually–we’re talking several hundred per minute! The result? Much cleaner carpets with considerably less effort exerted by you! These tools are revolutionary to the carpet cleaning industry, and can help improve cleaning results while reducing operator fatigue. A serious win-win!
Who Should Get one 
Cleaners with regular restaurant work, high traffic commercial accounts, extra dirty residentials, apartment move-outs, and stubborn traffic lanes could all benefit greatly from a rotary extractor. The beauty of a rotary extractor is that it eliminates the very taxing and repetitive motion of scrubbing back and forth with a wand. For you, this means spending less energy to clean, and getting better results to show for it.
Now jobs that used to be the most back-breaking are the most fun to clean! Plus, the heavily soiled jobs are the ones that you can justify charging a premium for, for being extra dirty! This allows you to rack up big tickets without the physical toll these jobs would normally take on your body. In short, anyone looking to take on more big ticket accounts, or those already regularly cleaning heavily soiled carpets would benefit greatly from owning a rotary extractor. Give your body relief, improve your deep cleaning results, and potentially even boost your bottom line!
Who Shouldn’t Get One
Rotary extractors are excellent tools, but with that said they probably won’t completely replace your current carpet wand. Most cleaners find themselves using a combo of the tools. The rotary gets used more in open areas and for traffic lanes while the traditional wand is used to get edges and hard-to-reach areas. For this reason, we wouldn’t recommend it as the first cleaning tool in your arsenal. Cleaners with small occupied residential accounts or regular maintenance accounts that are only lightly soiled may also find the power of a rotary extractor unnecessary. However, for those tight on space, but still in need of deep cleaning power, our slimmed-down T-Rex Jr. may be just the right tool!
More about Rotary Extractors
To learn more about rotary extractors, watch our videos below!
T-Rex Out of the Box: Click here to watch our Out of the Box video for the T-Rex, where we do a feature-by-feature overview of the machine!
T-Rex How-to: Click here to watch our video showing operation instructions for the T-Rex to get an idea of how they work!
