What Is Berber Carpet

What is Berber carpet?
Berber style carpet is a common and most preferred pick in Westchester County for heavy foot traffic places. These are stain-resistance and also durable. Berber rugs are often used for family rooms and basements.

Berber Carpet Colors & Short History 

So what is the Berber carpet definition? The term “Berber” is oftentimes used to represent any loop carpet. The word Berber technically specifies a particular kind of loop rug/carpet with a dense yarn and flecked color scheme (mostly a light tan tone with darker pitches).

The Berber carpets were founded in North Africa, where tribes used camel hair and sheep wool to make carpets, rugs, and cloaks.

Genuine Berber Rugs

In the late 90s, they were pitched as this ironed product that didn’t perform so well. It just didn’t deliver at all. But now, they come in a variety of fibers and have become very popular these days.

These days, the Berber carpet is most commonly made out of wool, olefin and nylon materials. Since they have low pile and compact loops, wool Berber rugs and the others can endure high foot traffic and yet look excellent.

Types Of Berber Carpets

Looped carpets can have various appearances, from a solid color to multi-colored. These carpets basically come in two different loop sizes. The loops can be:

  1. Level loop (single length loops)
  2. Multi-level loop (multiple length loops)

The multiple length loops generally help play around with creating different patterns and textured looks.

Back then, these looped carpets were commonly restrained to using in the basements and sometimes indoor/outdoor settings. Nowadays, with advancements in technology, fibers are made softer. Now loop carpeting is seen in common rooms to guest rooms and bedrooms as well.

Cost Of Berber Rugs

So are Berber rugs economic? They are known for their great value, but wool Berber carpets are not going to be cheap like other wool made rugs.

Of all rug fibers, wool is the most luxurious and pricey, so Berber rugs made in wool are expensive ones in the market. The retail price for buying them can cost ranging from US$6 to US$ 10 per square foot. On the other side, nylon Berber rugs are much cheaper to buy.

How To Clean Berber Carpets?

Berber carpets, although they are stain-resistant, often require more vacuuming than other types of carpet. The other thing is because they have big loops forming big valley patterns, which means you lose a bunch of your vacuum.

Regular vacuuming and cleaning Berber carpets allow the dirt and debris not to sit on the rug surface to accumulate. If dirt accumulates, they tend to run down deep into the rugs loop and make cleaning more challenging.

Clean At Home

  • Make a solution by mixing Oxiclean in water. Unless necessary, at the max, try going for spot cleaning rather than wetting the entire rug.

  • Next, remove most of the water out of the carpet. An easy way is to roll the rug, lean over a wall, and allow it to dry under the fan or use a blower.

Bleach Cleaning Berber Carpet

The heat helps remove oily substances from fibers. Although there is no color loss by putting regular bleach on an olefin rug, some olefin rugs, specifically the Berbers, have problem tracking and absorbing them. Therefore, avoid using bleach on olefin Berber rugs.

Drying Berbers

Berber takes a lot longer to dry. Typically twice as long. Why? It’s because usually it’s made out of olefin. So, where did much of the cleaning solution go? Yes, it’s to the back, and it also means you’re going to have more reappearing spots and wicking problems.

Problems like wicking reappearing spots etc. don’t happen on dry carpets; they happen on wet carpet. The faster you get this dry, the better off you’re going to be. So turn on the fan or use a blower for quick results.

Best Berber Carpet Fiber

  1. As mentioned earlier, Wool, be it Berber or any other rug kind, wool is the best fiber but apparently the most costly choice.
  2. Nylon. The nylon Berber carpets are an easily accessible kind of Berber.
  3. Olefin or Polyester (PET)
  4. Triexta (PTT)
  5. Mix.

What Is Berber Carpet Durability?

The durability of Berber carpets depends on the type of fiber used in making them. However, on average a woolen Berber rug can last for about 10 years.

Is Berber Carpet Good For Basements?

Okay, so a lot of basements in the Midwest they’ll have moisture issues with them. So of that, you don’t necessarily want to install a carpet over padding if you have moisture issues as padding will hold the moisture, and it’ll get moldy and mildew and funky.

So with that being said, a Berber carpet could be a good carpet to install in the basement because you could do a full-spread glue down. Install the Berber with no pad, and it would work fine under these conditions. It’s either Berber or an indoor/outdoor commercial type carpet that would operate just fine under those circumstances.

Berber Carpets For Stairs

Not to forget is that Berber runners, too, are excellent for decorating stairs. Wool Berber staircase runners hold grip under the feet and demonstrate great luxury. wool Berber carpet can also easily match up to the surrounding interior colors and enhance the overall look.

If you are looking for custom Berber rugs in wool, contact FI Rugs for the best quality and price.

Can Berber Carpet Be Patched?

Yes, that’s actually the one upside to Berber carpeting because it snags like crazy, but on the flip side of that, it actually patches very well. In most cases, you could patch it so that it’s a flawless patch; you won’t even know it was ever there. So that’s the one advantage to Berber carpeting.

Does A Berber Carpet Need A Pad?

Padding depends on the kind of surface the rug/carpet is going to be. Else, no, a Berber carpet does not need a pad. You can glue it to the floor directly. You can cut the fits with it, and since there’s no real pile, it won’t necessarily crush like a plush or frieze carpet.

So yeah, a Berber carpet does not need a rug pad, do it directly down installation, and you’ll be just fine.

Berber Carpet Prices

Here is the retail price because installers know what the wholesale prices are, but most of these questions come in from retailers.

A Berber carpet, the cheap end going into the big box stores, buying remnants of things like that you’re gonna pay about US$ 6 to US$ 8 per yard for the carpet only. Wool Berber’s prices, however, could really jump more.

Berber Carpet Pros And Cons

PROs

  1. Does not necessarily require a rug pad.

  2. Berber Carpet can be patched quite easily.

  3. They are inexpensive. Wool, however, cost more.

CONs

  1. Does the Berber carpet wear well? Slightly, not that well. One of the cons of these rugs is that they don’t wear well. We’re talking about traditional Berber carpets here; all this shows stains, and they snag easy.

  2. Berber carpets snag very easily. Drag anything across it, it could catch a loop, and it runs, then your backing catches it. It continues to run, and the carpet you invested a bunch of money into is a patchwork disaster throughout. So it would be best if you were a little careful about this little thing, else it’s going to be fine.

Is Berber Carpeting Good For Pets?

Absolutely not. Disobedient dogs and cats will absolutely destroy a Berber carpet much faster than they will with a plush just because of the loop factor. So the dogs get a little feisty jumping around and catch a loop, and it just runs and runs, and this process continues until you have a patchwork throughout your whole house.

Now can it be patched? Absolutely but do you want an installer at your house and once a month patching everything your dog destroyed. So yes, if you have pets, you’ll get far more performance out of a plush carpet.

How To Cut A Berber Carpet?

So this most likely came in from a DIY type. You need to use a sharp blade and change it often, especially if you’re a newbie DIY type of person and you’re just trying to cut it in yourself.

The second that blade dulls the blade dulls out on you as you cut the carpet it will just it frays everywhere it runs it gets ugly it gets messy, and it’s all bad so a fresh blade every few cuts is going to do you really well.

Multi-Level Loop Berber

One thing about the multi-level loop Berber, take your hand, pretend it is the slot of your tool. What do you notice when you pass your hand over that multi-level loop Berber rug is you’ll feel the big valleys where you’re just sucking the air out of the atmosphere, and that’s another reason why frequently the Berber rug is harder to dry.

What does that tell you about? That tells that you’re going to have to take multiple dry strokes, but you should also overlap 50% with your strokes, is this going longer to clean? Yeah, it’s gonna take two times more time to clean.

One of the biggest problems you’re gonna run into with Berber carpet is streaking, so you want to avoid that, you want to get some overlap, you must overlap to get extra dry.

Synthetic Berber

The other thing to point about nylon and olefin pieces of Berber carpet is that olefin is a mostly solid color. If you see solid color Berbers very most likely, it is a 100% percent olefin. If you see multiple colors, almost certainly, it’s mostly olefin with some nylon. Why do they do that? Well, it’s because, with the olefin, you’re confined to the colors you can use.

So to add more color, they use some nylon. You just lost one of the big advantages of an olefin, which is you can’t use bleach on this. If you reach out to feel each by waving your palm over them, you will feel the difference in the percentage of olefin and nylon used in them.

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