I am frequently asked how many sq. ft. of carpeting you can clean clean per hour with a Challenger or with a larger OP machine. My standard answer is that it depends upon soiling conditions in the carpet, which I know sounds like I'm intentionally avoiding giving a straight answer. But let me offer the two following jobs as examples.
On a day about 2 weeks ago I had 2 jobs scheduled: one a humongous home that my customers were just closing on that day; and the other, to be done after the first, a small, unimpressive attached townhouse whose carpets looked as if they were original to this maybe 30-year old property. The first job measured out at 2515 s.f. of w2w carpeting on 3 levels, as well as 3 flights of stairs of 14 steps each. I was unable to begin until 10:00 AM, the time of the closing, and was told when I arrived there that I had to finish before the movers were scheduled to arrive at 12:30 PM. Had I known of the 2nd requirement, I would have brought along with me one of the people I use on commercial jobs. Fortunately the carpets were only lightly soiled, with
very little in the way of heavily used traffic lanes and few spots. But some rooms had grey lines along the baseboards, which were not air filtration lines but embedded lint and dry soil. This had to be removed and vacuumed. Otherwise,I was able to work rapidly, and when the movers started walking in at 12:25, I had finished everything except 4 stairs, which the owner said to skip. My invoice went like this: 2515 s.f. @ .40/s.f. = $1006. And 38 stairs at 3.60 = 136.80, for a total of $1142.80 Divide this by 2.5 hours, and it comes to $457.10 per hour.
At the second house there were only 2 bedrooms and a flight of stairs to clean. However, the carpet was very old, may never have been cleaned, and the stairs were heavily spotted and stained. This job took close to 2 hours to get looking good, and I had already agreed to do it for my minimum of $150. So this one earned me just $75 per hour. My hourly earnings on the first job were over six times that of the second job.
That's what I mean by "it depends".
Good Information ! I assume you used Encap method on the large job ? Am I right to say that with the encap method you don't change pads as frequently as with regular OP?
