Smartstrand is a good product as Anso is also. With the Smarstrand, Lowes will sell you either identical of very close to identical for a huge savings. My customers will buy smarstrand from Lowes continually and we can not touch them. Anso is the real deal..but for Smarstrand go to lowes and save big dollars guaranteed. The words karastan mean nothing .. they are all Mohawk produced...at one time Karastan was a seperate company but Mohawk bought the name and its all made the same now. They both will wear extremely well...but nylon has much more history...and caress is still extremely soft.

I think Floortech is offering good guidance. Lowes has a crazy deal with Mohawk and it is almost impossible to beat them.

I went with Smartstrand from Lowes (their version of "Intelligent Style" renamed "Lucky Star") with the Smartcushion padding. After some heavy negotiation and price matching with a local store that had it on a crazy sale price of $2.39/ft (!!!!), I am having 720 ft installed for $2700, including a 13 step staircase. (fyi, I would have gone with the local store but they do not and would not install smartcushion, and would not promise power stretching).

I had heard horror stories about Lowes installers. But the Lowes installer here is actually a local flooring company that gets very good reviews, and when I mentioned power stretching they said "of course."

That is under $4/ft installed for carpet and padding with these specs:

FIBER:
Smartstrand Triexta BCF
WARRANTY:
Lifetime Stain, Lifetime Pet Urine, Lifetime Soil, 25 Year Abrasive Wear, 25 Year Texture Retention, Lifetime Anti-Static, 25 Year Fade-Resistance, 25 Year Manufacturing Defects
DENSITY:
2936
TWIST:
5.50 X 5.50
SPI OR RPI:
8.1
FACE WEIGHT O:
58.8
GA OR PITCH:
1/10
FINISH PILE HEIGHT:
20/32 (15.8mm)

My local Mohawk dealer said this was below his actual cost not counting the installation.

I should also mention the lowes store manager knows me by name as I bought a boatload of stuff from them in the last six months, and they also muffed a major order in an unfixable way (resold several thousand $$ of something that I had paid for that could not be replaced). So I think he is much more likely to work with me than most customers. Also, I had a verified local competitor with an insanely low price.

Even their regular price of $2.88/ft is a great deal.

We got the Smartstrand carpet from Lowes and we like the carpet itself. Granted, we've only had it for about a month. We had major problems with the installer Lowes contracted with and the carpet pad is having to be replaced due to bad quality. We purchased a 10lb pad made by Shaw that had a moisture barrier feature. All of the pad in our house was not made to spec. Some was too soft and some was too hard. Lowes and the distributor of this pad said they have never had this problem before. Just our luck, right! So now Lowes is replacing all of the carpet cushion with Mohawk's Smartcushion. What a pain to go through the exercise of having all our carpet pulled up and put back down again. Also, make sure they tape the carpet cushion joints to maintain the moisture barrier feature since our installers failed to do that too. Good luck!

Bumping this up to see if anyone has any additional responses to share as I am also thinking of purchasing smartstrand.

Bumping again. Interested to see how things are going with Smartstrand users...

Have been hearing horror stories about this stuff