A tiny percentage of homeowners clean for warranty purposes.
Retailers will admit that talking about warranty reminds people the carpet will need cleaning. It's a sale killer.
We still see a little claim work, but Jobs where the retailer or mill are involved are pretty rare anymore. We don't do inspections anymore and charge $500 per hour for expertise, which is usually what claims people want, while only paying for cleaning.
Two notable examples of why there's always better work:
We cleaned carpet for a Home Depot customer that wanted to maintain the warranty. Carpet was delaminating everywhere. The homeowner said HD sent an installer out to fix delaminating seams and the installer told her she needed to get the carpet cleaned before making a larger claim. She's been fighting HD to get her carpet replaced for 8 months now, and has learned they stopped selling that carpet due to delamination problems. All along the way HD keeps returning to the stance that our cleaning is what caused the problem, even though it was pre-existing. They finally agreed to replace, but wanted her to choose from several options that were a lower price than the carpet she had. This has mostly been a hassle for her so far, but I wonder if the cleaning suggestion by the installer was to get someone else involved to share the replacement cost.
A mill asked us to get involved with a claim in a downtown building. A janitor had a leaky bag and left an oily line across the entire lower lobby. In-house couldn't get it out, They were actually pretty good, they'd used heated portables followed by encap. Nothing the slightest bit oily came out or could be hidden.
The building manager was openly hostile, since they were looking forward to getting hundreds of thousands of dollars back from the mill because the carpet didn't "perform." The only parking space we were allowed to use was 400 feet away, and supposedly the only water available was in the basement, two floors below the lower lobby. Ten minutes into the first attempt at cleaning the lights were turned off, and we found the control panel locked.
We came back the following weekend with portable lights, and found a sympathetic security guard who thought what the manager was doing was BS. He couldn't get us into the lighting panel, but he did unlock a water source on the main floor. Carpet looked like new when we were finished
I was able to get a lot of really good after-cleaning pictures before security threw me out. They must have thought they caught me right away, since the manager poured coffee all over the carpet and tried to say the spots were returning.
Who need this for the price of cleaning?