How to identify high-quality machine-made bathroom rugs?

If you are new to the rug market, especially, as a new buyer for your company, it may be difficult to identify high-quality machine-made bathroom rugs. While an untrained eye may not understand what’s machine-made bath rugs, what’s the quality of the material, What aspects need to be paid attention to. Fear not, we’re here to help you break it all down.

What Are Machine-Made Bath Rugs?

Machine-made rugs are exactly what they sound like, they are made by a machine which is called jacquard machine and operated by computer. Computer operator gives a command in terms of color and size according to the design of the rug and machine works automatically. These rugs are typically mass produced and can be made at a much faster and cheaper rate.

Well, the plain solid bathmats are made from a level cut machine, here is a picture FYI.

Ultimate guide on how to identify a high-quality machine-made bath rug.

Quality of the material

When it comes to rugs, material is everything. So the material of the surface and the backing are very important. The function and price of carpets with higher pile density (number of lanes/foot or pile count/square meter) or carpets with higher pile weight (grams/square meter) with the same raw materials of the same process also higher. For example, pile weight 800gsm density is higher than that of 600gsm.

The price of carpets made of the same pile raw materials and different pile yarn processes, such as twisted yarn, textured yarn and filament plus stretch yarn, is higher than that of carpets made of normal filament yarn. From the below picture you can see, the rug made from twisted and untwisted yarn pile, the quality is different. The twisted yarn can bear many times of wash, and the yarn keeps straight and smooth. But the untwisted yarn turning into a flat pancake, the pile become matted after using, even though you wash it, it is still matted.

The bottom, usually it should be anti-skid. We talked about some of the different materials of backing in our previous posts, you can check it here.

https://ecozymat.com/types-of-rug-materials-suitable-for-the-bathroom/

Color fastness

One easy way to test if a rug is colorfast is to dampen a clean, white cloth. Rub the wet cloth on the surface of the rug. If any color comes off onto the white cloth, then the item is not colorfast and the dye will run when the rug is washed.

For a more thorough test for specific detergents and laundry products, use the following tips:

1). Mix one teaspoon of the laundry product (detergent, stain remover, chlorine bleach, or oxygen bleach) with 1/2 cup of warm water. Stir well to mix and be sure that any powdered formulas are completely dissolved.

2). Turn to the pile of the rug.

3). Dip a cotton swab in the solution and dab it onto the test area. Make sure the yarns are completely soaked with the liquid.

4). Blot the area with a white paper towel. If the color comes off onto the white paper towel, the fabric will bleed dye. If the color of the test area has changed or become lighter, the dye will bleed.

Shedding or not

A great way to test the material is by rubbing the carpet fabric between your fingers. If there is a lot of shedding, back away instantly… if your fingers can cause that, just imagine what feet would do.

Needle-punched and tufted rugs must be treated with anti-loose coating materials to fix the pile loops after needle-punched and tufted on the primary backing. Needle-pierced carpets generally use the dipping method, while the piled carpets use the backside coating method to fix the planted pile loops on the back.
The commonly used anti-loose coating material is styrene butadiene latex with a solid content of 50%-70%. If adding foaming agent, it becomes foamed styrene butadiene latex. This foamed styrene butadiene latex can replace the secondary backing jute. In addition, there are mechanically foamed PVC paste and PU as anti-loose coating materials. Among them, PU can be foamed and cured at room temperature, so heating equipment such as oven is not needed, but the price is higher.

Edge sealing

There are different ways of edge sealing.

This edge sealing, we call it overlocking. Some customers don’t like this kind of sealing, they think they are low quality and can not bear machine washing.

This edge sealing, we call it wrapping. This is much more welcome than overlocking. Because it is firm sealed, can stand many times of washing in the machine.

But we need to pay attention to the joint. Here is a example of the compare.

Bottom material

Bathroom mat is not only a kind of decoration, one of its most important function is anti-skid. Well, different materials of rug are usually made with different kind of backing, and the anti-skid performance of the backing of different materials is also different. Here is a picture to show you 4 common backings.

We hope to let you know what kind of bottom is usually used for bath rugs of different materials through the table below.

When it comes to anti-skid performance of the backing of different materials, here we list a table for your reference.

From the table, and from our experience with communication with our customers, we suggest TPR material better.