Thanks for that - very good points that hadn’t occurred to me. I need to consider this further. Perhaps it’s not such a good idea after all. Maybe just spot-clean the bits that have obvious soiling.
This is exactly why you should have a wooden floor, because the indoor environment will be so much cleaner and thus also healthier.
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I think it entirely depends on what’s underneath the carpet.
I was maybe a bit naïve when we purchased, and assumed that as with many other houses in the area there would be wood block floors underneath - in fact the house next door to the left has them and we were a combination of solid tiled and suspended with floorboards and unexpectedly chipboard in one room. After probably half a dozen carpet cleans a couple of areas began to dip when you walked on them - essentially chipboard weakened by moisture in that specific room.
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If this is a concern, then the carpet is likely being cleaned too wet. Professional cleaning may be unattractive on cost grounds. However the machine a professional uses, is a very significant machine in size, which not only cleans, removes the wash and is effective. Ventilation for a few hours and not walking on the carpet for the same is all that is required.
Easy to over due the cleaning with a hire or domestic machine, either getting too much water, having the temperature too high or not removing the debris.
Carpets may delaminate or shrink, which is very easy to occur if not cleaned correctly. One of the few jobs around the home, despite doing whole house renovations, I have never attempted for these reasons.
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We have suspended wooden floors with just ordinary floorboards on the wooden joists. However they are old. We found that the bedroom ones had badly rotted in various places when we took up the old carpets after moving in so had to replace entire floor. The lounge appeared to be sound - they looked obviously very old but no rotting or anything nasty in evidence.
Perhaps I’m looking for an excuse not be bothered with it, but your experience has made me think twice. The last thing I want is to have to start replacing floors due to damp/rotting etc. Really the carpets are only noticeably soiled in a few small areas - near the front door in the hall mainly. I think I’ll just spot clean here manually.
We’ve had the carpet throughout for around 8 years now. It’s still in fairly good condition. Probably look at replacing in around 3 years or so depending on how they go.
I would like wooden floors for the hygiene aspect but hard flooring always seems to lack ‘cosiness’ to me. It does look much smarter though.
I appreciate that professional grade machines are likely to perform the job better than a domestic purchase or hire machine. However, I do have a specific reason for not wanting either a hire machine or a carpet cleaning professional. And that is that I have seen first-hand some of the appalling filth that these machines are sometimes used to deal with. I don’t want a machine on our carpets that has been used for something like that. it may not worry others, but the thought of what it has potentially been in contact with puts me right off.
Another consideration is that any domestic carpet cleaners I’ve used (Bissell and Vax) have relatively small cleaning solution/water reservoirs and similarly small reservoirs for the fluid sucked back out of the carpet.
This can lead to far too many trips to the sink to top up the diluted cleaning fluid solution and empty the dirty sucked up fluid which is a time waster - lovely to see dirty water/foam geting sucked up but it’s all time consuming on a small scale.
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We’ve got one of the smaller Rug Doctor cleaners - much smaller than the one in Ravvie’s pic above, but which is good enough for the small area we needed to clean when Zebedee was in his cat spraying mood. Most recently used when my beer brewing kit leaked and dumped a couple of pints of beer into the newish carpet in the study/store room.
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We bought a Vax some years ago to help with incontinent parents on both sides in their homes. It worked very well, but it needs to be done on a warm day to assist in the drying. Easy to use and Rug Doctor carpet cleaning materials are available at larger Tescos.
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Professional Rug Doctor listed at the usual river place for nearly £800! It would need to get an awful lot of use to justify that. I suppose someone with a large property and frequent need to clean might think it a worthwhile investment.
Yeah, ours is the much “spot cleaner” version. I wouldn’t want to use it to clean the whole house though 
You used to be able to hire them from Tesco.
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The Bissell I found to be fragile and a bit temperamental. The Vax is simpler, hugely effective and robust.
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With over 40 experience I’m not recommending any machine as most do what they’re meant to do. My only comment is do not use any or very little soap. Soap stays within the fibres and actually attracts dirt, also once you clean a carpet it’s never the same and you’ll find you then need to do it regularly to hold its shape and appearance.
And I certainly wouldn’t recommend the type you can hire from supermarkets, it’s better to get a professional to do it.
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If you have pets that have accidents, then owning rather than renting is certainly worth it. With had a very British thing. The George was Henry’s green cousin
For all the reasons mentioned by @Innocent_Bystander we tired of this an in the next home decided against wall-to-wall carpeting and opted for rugs instead. Ultimately, you can roll them up and ask the dry cleaners to collect them for the spring clean or if something really awful happens on them, you’ve just lost one area rug, not the whole carpet.
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We have ours commercially wet cleaned once each summer. It’s very cost effective as well as saving your own time and not doing as good a job.
Much smarter Mike I’ve witnessed some horrible results with home machines.
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That certainly doesn’t look like a serious machine. Most do what there meant to, it’s generally operator error that causes the problem.
The Henry and George are somewhat of a British institution. They’ve been in production longer than I’ve been alive.
It was tongue in cheek. 
I’m sure it does a fine job.
We bought a Bissell carpet cleaner a few years back and it works great and is very easy to use. It’s red and charcoal coloured plastic, with some clear bits. We’re in Canada and it was about $250 cad on sale, but it’s always about $250-300 cad.
We just loaned it to a friend and she had no problem figuring it out and said it worked great. It’s easy to clean afterwards as well.
Hope this helps.
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