What are my on-going costs for carpet cleaning chemicals?
You’ll need a few hundred pounds worth of chemicals to get started. But the good news is that on-going costs for chemicals in carpet cleaning is very low. The main products you’ll use most jobs include:
- Pre-spray
- De-foamer
- Extraction product or Rinse agent
- Deodoriser
- Spotting products
Let’s take a look at the typical material cost for a 4 bedroom house using 75 litres of extraction solution in the machine. The following estimates are very approximate and we’ve estimated high – so actual costs are likely to be less.
Approximate cost of chemicals for cleaning 4 bed house
Pre-spray = Wool-X (dilutes 20:1)
Cost for 5 litres £13.49
Cost of diluted pre-spray 13.5p per litre
Pre-spray use on this example job = 3 litres
Cost of pre-spray 40.1p
Defoamer = Defoam-X
Cost for 5 litres = £13.49
Cost of 80ml De-foamer used on this example job 33p
Extraction product = Rinse-X (dilutes 200:1)
Cost for 5 litres Rinse-X = £14.39
Cost of diluted Rinse-X = 0.015p per litre
Cost of 50L Rinse-X used on example job = £1.08p
Deodoriser = Prochem Odour Fresh (dilutes 100:1)
Cost for 5 litres Odour Fresh = £14.85
Cost of diluted Odour Fresh per litre = 3p
Cost of Odour Fresh used on example job = £2.25
Spotting products
Lets say on this job, there’s a typical number of spots that need to be treated separately after cleaning. We’ll use various different spotting products to treat the different stains.
To simplify, we’ll say we used a ¼ of a litre of spotting product in total, with an average price of £10 per litre for the different spotters we’ve used.
Cost of spotting products used is therefore £2.50
Total cost
Total cost of chemicals used to clean all carpets in this typical 4 bedroom house = £6.56
Price for cleaning 4 bedroom house = £350
Cost of chemicals as % of price charged = 1.87%
Conclusion
As you can see, although you will need to invest in various different cleaning solutions to get started, the on-going cost of cleaning solutions is very small. By far the biggest cost in carpet cleaning is labour, so if you plan to do the work yourself, it’s easy to keep your running costs very low.
Thinking about starting a new carpet cleaning service?
Here’s how we can help:
- Get trained up on one of our professional carpet & upholstery cleaning courses
- We can help you spec a professional carpet cleaning machine to match your budget and business needs
- We can help you put together a complete start-up equipment package
- We can provide top notch on-going support and supplies as your business grows