Thursday, April 14, 2011

WD-40 Removes Chewing Gum from Carpet

As I was sitting in my living room recently, I happened to glance down and noticed an ugly, black spot on my cream-colored wall-to-wall carpet that had not been there before. Upon closer examination, the offending stain was revealed to be a sticky, lumpy mass of dirty chewing gum that either my husband or I must have inadvertently tracked in on the bottom of one of our shoes. I couldn't just leave it there—a hunk of black gum on a light carpet in the middle of the living room is an eye-sore, to say the least—but how was I going to get chewing gum out of my carpet?

I first tried the obvious solution of picking the gum out with my fingers and a paper towel. Little came off this way, and what did irritatingly found its way under my fingernails. I briefly considered using peanut butter, as that is considered the classic remedy for getting gum out of hair, but rejected the idea because then I would be faced with the problem of removing peanut butter from the carpet. Were commercial carpet cleaners and stain removers equipped to handle either peanut butter or chewing gum? Finally, I had an inspiration: WD-40.

The thought process that led me to this ingenious solution was as follows: WD-40 is known to remove sticky things like labels by dissolving adhesives; gum shares many properties with adhesives; I wonder if WD-40 will dissolve gum. So, I duly dug out a can of the solvent, sprayed a liberal quantity on the offending gum wad, and scrubbed at it with a paper towel. It took several rounds of spraying and scrubbing to remove all of it, but, in a surprisingly short amount of time, the gum easily dissolved and came free of the carpet pile. When I was finished spraying and scrubbing, no trace of the black, sticky gum remained on the carpet, and the WD-40 evaporated without leaving a stain behind. Five minutes later I couldn't even tell exactly where the gum had been!

Ref: associatedcontent.com

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