How to Get Blood Stains Out of Carpet

LESLIE: Chuck in Rhode Island needs some help cleaning something. What’s going on at your money pit?

CHUCK: How would you suggest I go about removing blood stains from carpeting?

LESLIE: Well, I’m assuming since you’re calling in, it’s nothing that we want to hide or cover up, correct?

CHUCK: No, no. Oh, no, no. No, no, no, no.

TOM: Alright. Have they been down there a long time?

CHUCK: Yeah, about six months.

TOM: Alright. So, there’s a couple of different things that you can try. One of which is to make a paste out of salt. And so you take a bowl of cold water and you put enough salt in to make a bit of a paste. And then you apply that to the carpet, let it sit a bit. Brush it in with a small brush, like a small hairbrush or a toothbrush, and see if it starts to lift the stains away. You can dab it with water to kind of thin out the salt.

Then after it dries, you can vacuum it and that’ll pull all the rest of the salt off of it.

CHUCK: Uh-huh. OK.

TOM: So that’s one way to do it. The other way to do it is to try to make a mixture of hydrogen peroxide up and water. This hydrogen peroxide will also clean up blood. I always say to try this, though, in an area that’s inconspicuous because it also has somewhat of a bleaching effect. We don’t want to have you bleach out the carpet.

So you can try it in a corner, under furniture, in a closet, wherever you have a less visible area.

CHUCK: What ratio of the peroxide to water?

TOM: Well, no, actually, you can just put the peroxide on without water. Just put like 3-percent hydrogen peroxide.

CHUCK: OK. I’ll try those items and see what happens.