SEPTEMBER 24, 2009 ISSUE
Full Steam Ahead Celebrates Ten Years of Making Homes Healthy
Pete and Lane Weiss and their company, Full Steam Ahead Professional Cleaning and Restoration, have spent the last 10 years not only cleaning carpets, but also making sure homes are healthy. Full Steam Ahead was one of the first businesses in the High Country to adopt environmentally safe business practices. Photos by Bernadette Cahill When Pete Weiss leaves a house he’s been working on, most of his customers are glad just to see carpet stains gone. But Weiss’s standards are higher.
When he and his staff finish a carpet job, they expect the home not only to be clean, but to be healthy. And his company, Full Steam Ahead Professional Cleaning and Restoration, is now celebrating ten years doing just that. His business has been at 309 Highway 105 Extension in Boone since 1999.
“Our cleaning industry is to make homes healthy,” said Weiss. “You are not just making a spot go away, you are going in and killing bacteria and things that could be harmful to health.”
Full Steam Ahead “is a small business that in this town they’d consider a pretty big business,” he said. “Mainly we do water damage and smoke damage.”
Weiss is a master cleaning and restoration technician and Full Steam Ahead is a member of the Institute of Cleaning and Restoration—certifications that took about five years to get. He is also a recognized disaster restoration contractor. All the staff of Full Steam Ahead are also factory-trained: Weiss sends them to school to learn carpet-cleaning and get their certification.
In all, Weiss has 15 years’ experience in the business. His staff generally does the carpet cleaning; he does the disaster restoration and deals with the insurance companies.
Whether his client is corporate or residential, Weiss’s hallmark is the emphasis on health.
Because of the humidity, carpets in 90 percent of homes in the High Country have some sort of mold and mildew, especially if the house faces north, said Weiss.
“It’s not going to kill you, but as time goes on if you have a little baby and you haven’t cleaned your carpet in years, he’s crawling around on the carpet, there’s no telling what he’s breathing in,” said Weiss. “Think about how many kids today have respiratory or asthma problems because their homes are sick. The air quality inside their homes is worse than the air quality outside.”
Weiss recommends carpet cleaning once or twice a year—the second perhaps treating only the traffic areas. He uses a hot water extraction method, and the more than 240-degree water kills bacteria. He also uses environmentally safe cleaning solutions from the Bane-Clene System.
“I remember years ago when I was young and my mom got her carpet cleaned and people would say, ‘don’t put your animals on the carpet,’ or ‘don’t let your pets on it until it dries.’ Well, that didn’t make sense to me. I wanted to be able to use something safe for myself but also I wanted to have something safe for my clients. That’s why we use environmentally safe products.”
When Weiss started 10 years ago, he was the first to advertize an environmentally safe cleaning process, setting a local trend.
Weiss got into the cleaning business from observing what was going on in construction and maintenance. A carpenter by trade who built houses and had a flooring company, Weiss saw that property management companies had to contract their cleaning and restoration to several different outfits, which was cumbersome. He offered them a “one call does it all” package including carpet and upholstery cleaning, 24-hour emergency service, window and pressure washing, water damage and structural damage treatment.
He offers basically the same services to individual homeowners. Last winter many locals encountered him after their pipes burst in the bitter cold.
Weiss’s company is still hands-on. His wife, Lane, sometimes helps with billing in the back office. For a while during the past 10 years Weiss expanded, “but it got to a point where it was more headaches, and I downsized and I am glad I did,” he said.
“We’re still here, we are green, which is what everybody’s going for, and we started 10 years ago doing it,” he said. “I appreciate all the business everybody’s given me, and appreciate the companies that have stuck with me and all the people that have been good to us throughout the years.”
Full Steam Ahead Professional Cleaning and Restoration is located at 309 Highway 105 Extension in Boone. For more information, call 828-265-4175.
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