Commercial Carpets – Understanding Your Investment

Quite often, when buying a new carpet for the facility, businesses adopt a very simplistic cost evaluation model. This model is based on how much a business would be investing in terms of first cost and a surface estimate of the carpet’s service life.

Divide the two—first cost divided by estimated service life—and the solution which yields the lowest value,is instantly given the go-ahead.

However, this approach is not the best to go with.

The first cost model overlooks several important aspects of the investment, leading to a decision that does not serve well in the long run.

Therefore, it’s vital that businesses get a complete understanding of their flooring investment, which entails the full life cycle cost of a carpet and a detailed estimation of its service life. This can help you choose a carpet for your facility that would serve you best.

A Holistic Carpet Cost Evaluation Model

As discussed above, a carpet cost evaluation model should encompass consideration of a carpet’s full life cycle cost and its expected years of use. So you basically need two elements to work with.

Let’s expand each of these elements and get a better idea of what you need to include to get to the right figures and perform a holistic and more accurate evaluation of the flooring investment that you will be making.

Full life cycle cost of a carpet

This should include all the carpet related costs:

  • Purchase cost;
  • Cost of removing the old carpet (or any other old installed flooring for that case);
  • Installation charges to be paid for the new carpet;
  • Labor cost to be paid in preparation of the office site;
  • Financial losses to be incurred as cost of business disruption (if any);
  • And, maintenance cost of carpet (includes both routine maintenance and professional maintenance).

Of course, you may not always have access to accurate figures, and if so, you can work your way with estimations. But keep them reasonable.

Expected service life of a carpet

Now this is where things get trickier and require assessment of multiple factors to reach a close-to-accurate number.

First off, you need to factor in what type of business do you run. If you run a hotel, regardless of a carpet’s actual service life, you will have to undermine the number. Simply because,you need to change carpets more frequently to maintain the ratings of a hotel.

If you don’t have any such exclusive requirements, you can then switch your focus to the foot traffic that your facility receives on a day to day basis. The heavier the foot traffic, the shorter would be the service life of a carpet.

Another important consideration that you must factor in is the color requirements for a carpet. If light color best complements the settings in which you want to install a carpet, then you cannot expect to last your carpet for long. Light colors easily get dirty and stained. You will have to replace your carpet more frequently.

Finally, you should put into consideration the yarn type of the carpet you are interested in purchasing. Different yarn types offer different shelf lives.

This type of evaluation model no doubt is time intensive but the expensed time is worth it and will help you in making a decision which you won’t rue later.

A BONUS read: Which Carpet Cleaning Method is Better for Your Commercial Facility?