How Spiker prices every job, and why the number does not change

The definitions, published

A room is up to fifteen by fifteen feet. That is stated in writing rather than left to interpretation on the day.

A staircase is priced as one room. Add-ons apply to it exactly as they apply to a room.

A hallway is not a room. A closet is not a room. Hallways and landings are quoted at the walk-through.

Those four sentences prevent the most common pricing dispute in this trade, and they cost nothing to publish.

Deep clean — fifty dollars per room

What this is addressing: body oils build up in the pile from bare feet, shoes and cooking vapour. On their own they are a soil problem. Combined with sand they become worse, because sand landing on an oily surface sticks at the top of the pile instead of falling to the base — exactly where every footstep grinds it into the fiber.

What we do: alkaline pre-spray to release and suspend the oils, with real dwell time so the chemistry works. Hot water extraction at 230 to 250 degrees Fahrenheit, 4.0 GPM at 1,200 PSI. An acid rinse to neutralise the alkalinity and return the fiber to neutral pH. Then recovery through a 400-plus CFM truck-mounted vacuum blower, which is what takes the soil, the spent chemistry and the freed sand out of the building.

Recommended annually. More often with children or animals.

Pet enzyme — twenty-five dollars per room

Required on every job with animals in the home. Priced per piece on upholstery.

Why it is not optional: animals leave microbiology and bacteria-laden oils wherever they lie down. That is the source of the smell people describe as wet-animal.

Running hot water and high pressure across contaminated carpet without treating it first spreads the contamination through the pile rather than removing it, and the room can smell worse afterward than it did before. It is the most common reason a homeowner says their carpet smelled bad after a cleaning.

Enzymes are biological agents that digest organic material. They are applied before extraction begins, and they need contact time and moisture to work. Those same animal oils are also what sand sticks to, so this step protects the fiber as well as the air.

Pet urine flush — thirty dollars per three-by-three area

Quoted only after a blacklight inspection. Handled before the room is cleaned.

Why the inspection comes first: the visible surface mark is a fraction of the deposit underneath, and older deposits frequently show nothing at all in daylight. Pricing without mapping means either overcharging for area that does not need treatment or discovering the real scope halfway through.

Why it happens before cleaning: running water across an untreated deposit spreads it outward into clean carpet and causes it to wick back to the surface as the carpet dries.

What we do: map the real extent with UV, flood the affected area with enzyme in enough volume to reach the depth the urine reached, then draw as much back out of the padding as the machine can physically recover.

This is a genuine attempt and it resolves a great many of them. It is never sold as a certainty, because until the floor is opened nobody knows how far it travelled. Pulling carpet, pulling pad and sealing a subfloor is construction work and Spiker does not do it.

Protector — twenty-five dollars per room

Once a year. Priced per piece on upholstery.

What it is: a coating bonded around each fiber that holds the twist closed. It is structural, not simply a stain shield, and it is consumable — sand grinds it thinner every year, fastest in the traffic lanes.

What happens without it: once enough coating is worn through, the fiber opens and frays. Light scatters instead of reflecting, and the carpet reads dull and grey. That change is permanent and no cleaning reverses it.

We are not selling the same thing twice. We are replacing a layer that was consumed protecting the carpet, before the fiber underneath starts paying instead.

It also has to go onto clean, neutralised fiber. Protector applied over alkaline residue bonds to the residue rather than the carpet, which is the most common reason people say protector did not seem to work.

It is a maintenance coating that wears with use, not a guarantee against staining.

Pre-vacuuming — twenty-five dollars per room, or free

Every job gets pre-vacuumed. The only question is who does it.

Dry soil has to come out before any moisture goes down. Once water hits loose grit it becomes mud in the pile and no amount of extraction fully recovers it.

If you vacuum before we arrive, we skip straight to pre-treatment and it costs nothing. If it has not been done, we do it properly at twenty-five dollars per room. Either way it happens, because the result depends on it.

The minimum — two hundred dollars

Stated everywhere a price appears.

Per-room and per-square-foot rates build toward this minimum. They are not standalone visit prices.

The reason it exists is protective rather than extractive. A company without a minimum has to invent an upsell to make a small job worth driving to, and that pressure lands on the customer at the door. A published minimum means nobody ever needs to.

The walk-through

Happens before any equipment comes off the truck.

You get the complete number for your specific house, and it does not change unless you change the job.

If something will not come out — bloomed fiber in a traffic lane, a stain that has been sitting in the backing for two years — you are told then, not after you have paid.

What we do not do

We do not move furniture, because setting it back onto damp carpet traps moisture underneath. We clean around it, and every square foot you expose is a square foot we clean.

We are not a maid service. We do not pick up clothing, toys, pet waste or clutter. Prep time is not cleaning time, and the more carpet you expose before we arrive, the more of it actually gets cleaned.

We do not pull carpet, replace padding or seal subfloors.

We do not use topical or colour-enhancing sealers on indoor natural stone.