Shampooing your own carpet can be a good way to save money. It is certainly cheaper to shampoo your own carpet than to call a professional. You can also decide to shampoo your own carpet on a whim rather than having to wait for a carpet shampooer to fit you into their schedule. Nobody can fault you for shampooing your own carpet to take advantage of these benefits. However, you should still consider incorporating the occasional professional carpet cleaning appointment into your routine. Here's why.

Professional shampooing will remove grime from the deeper layers of your carpet.

Home carpet shampooers can do a pretty good job of cleaning the top layers of the carpet. However, they don't tend to have enough suction power to reach the deeper layers of the carpet. Your carpet may look clean when you're done shampooing, but there is probably some grime lingering deeper down. In the weeks after you clean your carpet, some of it may work its way back to the surface.

Professional carpet cleaning equipment is much more powerful than home carpet shampooing equipment. It can suck the grime out from the deeper layers of the carpet. It's a good idea to get rid of this deep-down grime from time to time so it doesn't work its way back up, make the carpet look grimy, and possibly trigger allergic reactions when the grime happens to be pet dander and mold spores.

Professional cleaning will remove stains you can't get rid of yourself.

Removing stains from your carpeting is not always easy. You can scrub and dab all you want, but it's tough to know what cleaner to use and how to best address the stains. A carpet cleaning company can look at the stains and assess how to best remove them. If you have them visit every now and then, they can go over the stains that have been bugging you for a while and either remove them or make them far less obvious.

Professional cleaning will remove odors.

After you shampoo your carpet, do you ever notice there are still some lingering odors? This could be due to grime lingering in the deeper layers of the carpet. It could also be due to the slow drying of a carpet after a shampooing session. A professional cleaning will remove the smelly grime, and it also suctions water out of the carpet to allow for faster, smell-free drying.