If you’re like most people, your sofa is one of the most important pieces of furniture in your home. It’s where you relax after a long day, watch TV, and entertain guests. But over time, your sofa can start to look a little worse for wear. Stains, pet hair, and general dirt can make it look dull and uninviting.
There are more than 200 sofa cleaning service providers in Singapore. The common sofa cleaning types used by professional sofa cleaners are sofa shampooing, hot water extraction and encapsulation methods. Confused over which cleaning method to engage when selecting your preferred sofa cleaning service provider?
We have summarized brief information about the different cleaning types to help you make more informed decisions about which cleaning company you would like to engage to clean your sofa.
Fabric Sofa Cleaning Methods in Singapore
1: Shampooing

Upholstery shampooing is the process of cleaning soft furnishing by scrubbing it with foamed cleaning solutions. The cleaning solution can either be brushed onto an object manually, or via motorised brushing machine.
A water extraction machine will be used to remove the excess liquid in fabric upholstery. The sofa would usually take 6 to 12 hours to dry, depending on how wet the sofa is after cleaning treatment. For a leather sofa, a special leather conditioner would be applied to moisturise the upholstery after shampooing to prevent leather cracks.
2: Hot Water Extraction

Hot water extraction method is an effective method to remove stains from fabric upholstery. The high-temperature cleaning solution helps break down organic compounds and proteins, while also killing bacteria that could be present on the fabric or padding in your seats.
So how does this cleaning method work? High-temperature cleaning solution would be injected by professional sofa cleaners into the fabric upholstery and the liquid will then be extracted into the machine tank simultaneously. After cleaning, the wet fabric would usually take 6 to 12 hours to dry after the cleaning treatment, depending on how wet the sofa is after the cleaning treatment.
3. Low Moisture Sofa Cleaning
To professional sofa cleaners, the key to cleaning a fabric sofa efficiently is to avoid applying too much water during the cleaning process to prevent fabric shrinkage, odour development and mould “infestation”.
In recent years, one of the latest sofa cleaning methods is using low moisture encapsulation technology. This cleaning method uses a special cleaning solution that encapsulates grime and dirt particles into fine powder which can then easily be vacuumed away or brushed away from the fabric.
Fabric sofa is usually damp (not wet) after cleaning. When using a low moisture sofa cleaning method, a cleaned sofa usually would take no longer than 6 hours to completely dry – 50% shorter drying time than other wet cleaning methods. In fact, if the fabric sofa is relatively spotless and does not require much cleaning solution to clean, the cleaned sofa can potentially be used immediately after a low moisture sofa cleaning treatment.
The advantage of low moisture sofa cleaning methods is sofa cleaners will be able to clean fabric sofas using only a fraction of the amount of water compared to other sofa cleaning methods. Using less water to clean the fabric upholstery means the risk of fabric shrinkage is reduced, and most importantly, time taken to dry the wet sofa will be significantly faster!
Before deciding which sofa cleaning company you’d like to engage to clean your sofa, find out the cleaning method the company uses and ensure the cleaning method used is safe for your upholstery material.
De Hygienique uses a low moisture sofa shampooing method with encapsulation technology to clean and sanitize fabric upholstery. For the leather sofa, we use professional leather shampoo cleaning and moisturizer solution to deep clean leather upholstery.
To find out more about our sofa cleaning services, contact De Hygienique for a no-obligation consultation today.