Wool Carpet Pros and Cons List
New home owners or interior designers may find themselves asking the question: carpet, wood, or tile? The kind of flooring you purchase is very dependent on your lifestyle. While carpeting can be best for families with young children, wool carpeting is not always the right answer. For those of you that are asking the question of whether or not to invest in wool carpeting, it will pay off to do a bit of research, as many people not know the true pros and cons of wool carpeting.
List of Pros of Wool Carpet
1. Made Naturally
For individuals that enjoy natural items over synthetic ones, wool carpeting may be your next choice for your home or apartment. As wool is made from the fur of sheep, this kind of carpet is completely natural. While it can be dyed into many different colors, most people prefer this kind of carpeting because of how soft it is to the touch.
2. It is Not Flammable
Another reason so many people love wool carpet is because of its resistance to flames. While you hopefully may never have a fire in your own home, many corporate companies and offices install wool carpeting in their buildings. Its resistance to fire acts as a safety measure in the event of an emergency.
3. Keeps Dirt Away
In both commercial and non commercial buildings, the best thing about wool carpeting is that it resists dirt. The actual structure of wool fibers hide dirt better than the fibers of synthetic carpets. Wool fibers can actually be cleaned easier as well. The way the light hits the opaque fibers makes the dirt harder to see. Though dirt may be in your carpet, you’ll have a hard time finding it in wool.
The high capacity of wool to hide dirt makes wool carpeting the perfect choice for business that receive high levels of traffic like hotels an higher end stores. In these places, hundreds of people can walk all over the carpet and very little dirt will show through.
4. Insulates Well
During the colder months, you’ll be glad you went with wool carpeting. Wool carpeting is a great insulator for your home as it holds heat well and will keep the room warm even if it is cooler outside. The natural crimp in the wool is really what makes it such a good insulator.
List of Cons of Wool Carpet
1. Expensive
Anyone who has taken an interest in wool carpeting can tell you that this process is definitely not a cheap one. While wool itself is relatively accessible, the actual carpeting installation is what is going to cost you. Wool typically sells at about $5 – $26 per square foot. Add that up for the size of the room or building you are having carpeted to get your not-so-affordable sum total.
2. Very Sensitive to Stains and Chemicals
Wool carpeting is not for families with very young and messy children. Imagine, just one spilled drink can end up staining your new carpet for the rest of its life. Wool’s ability to hold its color makes it great for dying but really terrible for stains.
In addition to being sensitive to staining, wool carpeting is often easily affected by chemicals. If you, for example, spilled a bottle of bleach onto your carpet, you may soon find that the fibers themselves have been chemically burned down. Pair this sensitivity together with the price and you’ll see that risking a wool carpet in your home is a lot higher than what you originally expected.
3. Wool Fibers Can Be Easily Distorted
Wool fibers can easily be damaged and distorted beyond repair. In addition to stains and chemicals, heat can damage the wool fibers themselves. Synthetic fibers have a chance to bounce back after some kind of disturbance, but wool fibers are destroyed for life.
4. Wool Can Fuzz Easily
The way wool carpeting is installed makes it much more prone to “fuzzing”. Fuzzing can occur when your carpet is agitated constantly through furniture constantly moving back and forth or items being dragged across the floor. Wool comes as a staple yarn and can easily revert into the fuzzy stringiness of yarn.
For those of us that are interested in the finer things in life, wool carpeting definitely seems like the only way to go. Be sure, however that if you are willing to pray the price for wool carpets, you are willing to take care of it correctly.
From these pros and cons, we can see that wool carpeting does best in situations of low abrasion, no staining, low heat kind of environments. If you can manage to maintain this kind of atmosphere for your new wool carpet, then you should be able to avoid all of the cons that come with it.