Cost of Ownership

DESSO^® carpet: the most economic flooring solution

The total life cycle costs of installing and maintaining carpet are more economical than those of hard flooring solutions. As indicated by various cleaning and maintenance institutes and consultants, such as the US Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification and Dutch cleaning consultant James, the total life cycle costs of hard flooring solutions can be up to two times higher than those of carpet (depending on application and intensity of use).

Costs are calculated over an average expected lifetime of hard flooring of 22 years and include a replacement of carpet after 11 years. Over 90% of these life cycle costs relate to time/labour, while the remaining part consists of cleaning supplies and equipment and overhead costs. As hard flooring solutions require 2 times more cleaning time annually and cleaning supplies and equipment for hard floors are on average 7 times more expensive, it can be explained that life cycle costs of hard flooring solutions are significantly higher than those of carpeted floors.

An important additional benefit of carpet over hard floors is the fact that there is no necessary downtime for cleaning and drying as with hard floors after annual heavy cleaning. Furthermore, cleaning detergents for carpets are less aggressive than those for hard flooring solutions.