Every equipment salesman will steer you toward a $10,000 truck-mount rig. Ignore them for now. You can start carpet cleaning for under $2,000 with a portable hot-water extractor and residential jobs.
A truck-mounted system heats its own water, pulls stronger suction, and dries faster. It is also $10,000 or more before you touch a single carpet, and it locks you into one vehicle. For your first year of houses and apartments, a good portable extractor plus a pump sprayer does the same job. Buy the truck-mount when your calendar is full and drying time is costing you bookings, not before.
Here is what most beginners get wrong: the machine is not what cleans the carpet. The pre-spray and its dwell time are. You spray the traffic lanes, let the solution sit and break down the soil for ten to fifteen minutes, then extract. Skip the dwell and you are just pushing hot water around while the dirt laughs at you. Cheap machine plus correct dwell beats expensive machine plus impatience every time.
Your margin lives in the upsells. Fabric protectant applied after the clean takes ten minutes and can add thirty to fifty percent to the ticket. Upholstery and area rugs use the same equipment you already brought. Quote them at the door.
For commercial work, learn the low-moisture encapsulation method. Offices cannot wait hours to dry, and encapsulation lets you clean at night and have them open by morning.
The rest, the exact machine specs, chemical choices by carpet type, and how to price by the room versus the square foot, is in the full plan:
See the full carpet cleaning business plan →
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