Keep Above
Buy or hire the carpet cleaner
Carpet cleaners are hired by the day and owned ones sit in cupboards between uses — exactly the trade this calculator counts. Buying one, with upkeep and an eventual sale, against hiring each time, over the same years and uses a year: each lands on a cost per year and per use, with the break-even stated and no winner declared.
Not counted while this is $0
After 5 years
Delivery, membership, deposits — not counted while $0
Put in what buying one would cost, and what one hire would cost. Nothing here is read from your budgets, and nothing is saved.
| Owning | Hiring | |
|---|---|---|
| Paid up front | — | — |
| Value lost | — | — |
| Hire fees | — | — |
| Other costs | — | — |
| Total over 5 years | — | — |
| Cost a year | — | — |
| Cost a use | — | — |
What does a carpet cleaner cost sitting in a cupboard?
A carpet cleaner is small enough that storage is rarely the idle cost — what it takes between jobs is chemical and mechanical. Solution goes off, and pump seals, hoses and brushes are the parts that suffer from long gaps rather than from heavy use. A hired machine is turned round between hires by whoever hires it out, so that maintenance sits inside the fee instead of in a box on the owning side.
The uses-a-year field reads differently here too, because carpet cleaning tends to arrive in a burst: several rooms across one weekend, then nothing for a year. Those rooms are one hire and therefore one use, so the number that belongs in the field is the number of occasions rather than the number of carpets.
This is one of the tools built into Keep Above
Keep Above is a budgeting app where you enter your bills and income and it works out the balance you need to keep — so you can see what's safe to spend. No bank connection, no ads on your data.
Owning and hiring separate over years rather than weeks, so the useful question is what a balance would look like that far out — which budgeting apps forecast your balance, and how far ahead.
About this calculator
What counts as upkeep for a carpet cleaner?
Cleaning solution it goes through in a year, the occasional filter or brush, and cupboard space if that matters — one yearly figure for whatever owning it would take. At $0 it isn't counted.
What would one hire include here?
The day rate plus what a hire actually takes to use — the cleaning solution usually sold alongside it, and any delivery. Yearly rather than per-hire costs belong in the extras box; a refundable deposit isn't a cost.
What is the crossing point?
The number of cleans a year at which the two totals would land on the same figure, over the years you set — a position in the arithmetic and nothing more. If owning nets to nothing once the sale is taken off, or the yearly extras on the hiring side already pass owning's whole total, there is no such number and the page says so rather than inventing one.
Does one hire cover more than one room?
A hire is priced by the period rather than by the room, so a weekend spent on the whole house is one use at whatever that period costs. Entering each room separately would multiply a fee that was charged once. Where a job genuinely runs past the return time and a second hire is needed, that is a second use.