Carpet Extraction Calculator

Soil level applies a multiplier to your entered production rate: light soil (1) keeps 100% of the rate, medium (2) drops it to 75%, and heavy (3) drops it to 55%. That reduced effective rate is what cleaning hours is actually divided from, so bumping a job from light to heavy soil roughly reduces speed by almost half, directly increasing both labor hours and labor cost even though production rate itself never changes.

Dilution ratio only enters the formula through concentrateGal = totalSolutionGal / dilutionRatio, which feeds chemical cost — cleaning time is driven entirely by sqFt divided by the soil-adjusted production rate and never references dilution ratio at all. A more dilute solution (a higher ratio like 1:200 instead of 1:128) means less concentrate per gallon of ready-to-use solution, so chemical cost drops, but the crew still moves at the same physical pace across the carpet.

It's a fixed estimate for wear, maintenance, and depreciation on the extraction machine, applied per cleaning hour with no distinction between portable units and truck-mounts in the formula itself. In reality truck-mounts tend to have higher wear costs per hour but also clean faster (reflected via a higher production-rate input), so the flat rate is a simplification — if your equipment costs diverge significantly from $5/hr, adjust your labor rate or treat the total cost as an approximation.

Solution volume per 100 sq ft is calculated as galPer100 = 0.5 + (soilLevel - 1) * 0.15, so it climbs from 0.5 gal/100 sq ft at light soil to 0.8 gal/100 sq ft at heavy soil. Heavier soil needs more pre-spray and rinse water to lift embedded grime, so both the time and the solution/chemical usage estimates rise together whenever you increase the soil-level input.