We clean carpets in Chingford by hot water extraction, the machine that pushes solution into the pile under pressure and pulls it straight back out again. A bedroom is £36, a living room £43 and a flight of stairs £41. Most rooms are walkable in two hours.
| Room | Price |
|---|---|
| Bedroom | £36 |
| Living room | £43 |
| Through lounge | £61 |
| Stairs, per flight | £41 |
The minimum charge on one off work is £67, so a single bedroom carpet on its own comes to that. Two rooms clear it comfortably. Most people add the stairs anyway, since in a 1930s semi the stairs carry every bit of dirt that comes through the front door and nobody can do them properly with a machine hired from a supermarket.
What happens before the wand goes down
Hoover first, with a beater bar, and not a token pass either. Extraction lifts what is bonded into the fibre; dry soil is a vacuum’s job, and skipping it only makes mud. Then the traffic lanes and any individual spots get treated and left a few minutes to work. Then the wand goes on in overlapping strokes, each one followed by a dry pass to take the water back out. We move sofas and beds. We will not empty a wardrobe.
Parquet under the carpet changes how wet we can go
This is the Chingford job that catches out firms from other parts of London. A lot of the interwar stock here still has its original parquet or block flooring underneath the fitted carpet, and block floors cup and lift once water gets through the underlay and into the bitumen. If we turn back a corner and find blocks, the machine drops to a lower flow rate and the passes slow down. It takes longer. The result is the same and the floor survives, which seems a fair trade for half an hour.
Concrete underneath is a different matter and we can run wetter. Ask us to check. Turning back a corner inside a wardrobe takes thirty seconds and settles it.
Houses on the forest side eat hall carpets
The detached and semi-detached places along Forest Side and Bury Road back straight onto Epping Forest, and everything that lives out there comes through the back door with the family. Leaf mould in October. Clay mud off the paths round Connaught Water from December to February, dog paws all year, and grit tramped in from the gravel drives. Hall and stair carpets in those houses go a flat grey that owners assume is permanent, and they usually come back better than expected, because most of what is in them is dry soil rather than grease.
We do a run of those every November, once the autumn has finished with them. Book it early.
Drying, and how to speed it up
Two hours to walk on. That is in a warm empty room with the door shut, and it stretches if the weather is damp and the windows have to stay closed, or if the carpet is a thick wool twist. Heating on low beats heating on high. A fan left on the landing does more than a radiator ever will. Keep rugs off the carpet until the pile is dry underneath, or you get a mark where the backing sat.
Stains we look at first
Dye transfer from a rubber-backed mat shows as a yellow or pink shadow in the fibre. Bleach spots and old pet urine that has reached the underlay behave differently from ordinary soil too. We check each one before the machine starts and tell you what result to expect, so you decide on the room with the facts in front of you.
Booking carpets alongside something else
Carpets are the commonest add-on to a move-out clean, because agents want extraction noted on the check-out report, and they are also the last stage of a deep clean after building work. Added to a move-out clean, a bedroom carpet drops to £29 and a living room to £36. It sits on the price list with everything else we do. We carry the machine over to Woodford Green and Buckhurst Hill about as often as we work Chingford itself, and the rest of what we cover in E4 is on the front page.
Questions we get asked
How much does carpet cleaning cost in Chingford?
A bedroom is £36, a living room £43, a through lounge £61 and a flight of stairs £41. The minimum charge on one off work is £67, so a single room on its own comes to that figure.
How long do the carpets take to dry?
About two hours before you can walk on them in a warm room with the door shut, and closer to five or six before the pile is dry all the way through. Damp weather and thick wool carpet both add to it. A fan on the landing helps more than turning the heating up.
Can you clean a carpet that is laid over parquet?
Yes, but we run the machine at a lower flow rate and take extra dry passes, because block floors lift and cup if water reaches the bitumen. Plenty of the 1930s houses in Chingford still have their original parquet under the fitted carpet. Tell us if you know it is there and we will plan for it.
Will you get pet stains out?
Fresh ones usually, older ones sometimes. Once urine has soaked through the underlay into the floorboards the smell is in the floor, and cleaning the carpet again will not fix it. We will tell you which of the two you have got before we charge you for a room.