Our mid-blue carpet in the lounge picks up every speck of dirt it encounters, any dirt that comes into contact with it turns into a dark splodge so I'd been hankering after some of this Vanish carpet cleaner for a week or so. Today I visited our local Wilkos and found a 500ml trigger spray for £3.98 and purchased it intending to use it when the weather dried out a bit.

The spray bottle is Vanish pink so easy to spot with a blue trigger dipenser and ours had "new improved formula" on the front in the form of a yellow sticker. I bought it and brought it home.

A couple of hours later disaster struck. My partner was attempting some pipework and he'd got to the point of trying the water through the pipes but forgotten to block the end of a vital pipe. A few hectic minutes of me shouting "turn it off!!" and my cats shouting because I was shouting resulted in a five foot long, two foot wide flood of rusty water on the aforementioned carpet.

I soaked the majority of the water up with towels but the resulting stain was huge, dirty and looked impossible to deal with. So my thoughts went to the new Vanish spray I'd just bought.

I've heard some brilliant reviews about the stain remover for clothes so I expected the same kind of brilliance from this.

On the back it tells you to spray onto the stain, leave for a few minutes then mop the excess spray off with a clean cloth and scrub if needed. I did just that, the spray comes out kind of frothy and smells pretty strongly of chemicals so it wasn't great for an asthmatic and made me wheeze a bit and gave me slight palpatations but I persevered.

When I got to the mopping off the excess part I found this was literally impossible, as much as you take the froth away more is produced the second you wipe over the area. I had to repeat this step several times and still couldn't remove all the spray even though I didn't use much. I decided to get the rubbing section out of the way and gave the area a good scrub which of course produced even more froth!

I have to say it did take the rusty stain out, you wouldn't know it had ever happened if you weren't one of our traumatised little family unit that had witnessed the horror! But the froth just kept on coming!

Eventually after six attempts to get rid of it I had to accept it wasn't shifting and smoothed the area down with paper towels over the top to dry. It's dried in a slightly crispy fashion so not great.

I'm pretty disappointed with this spray, although it removed the stain it's impossible to remove the spray itself so you swap one substance for another. I've no doubt this patch will accumulate dirt at a rate of knots because of the residue I couldn't get out so it's going to be a never-ending battle with the carpet until the summer when I can get my Vax carpet shampooer out again.

I don't recommend this for this reason.