AS&HF Article

Sponsor

FLOOR CARE
Five Tips to Stretch Your Dollars

Today, facility managers and building owners are faced with tough choices, including whether to perform restorative maintenance, restoration, or complete renovation. Under current economic conditions and the need to cut costs, many are choosing to emphasize interim maintenance and pushing back on expensive replacement or renovation projects. Schools and health care buildings—especially since many are publicly-funded facilities, which are being heavily impacted today—are asked to do more and maximize investments with fewer resources. A common cleaning function where school administrators and health care management teams should target, helping to lessen the burden, is floor care.

A well-prepared and productive cleaning team can
help extend refinishing cycles and costly repairs.

According to a new study from The Freedonia Group, Inc., the U.S. demand for hardsurface flooring is projected to advance 3.9 percent annually to reach 11.9 billion square feet in 2011. Additionally, cleaning crews can spend up to 80 percent of their shift specifically addressing floor care needs, including autoscrubbing, vacuuming, mopping, sweeping, etc. Since labor accounts for the majority of your costs, efficient procedures and extensive know-how must be mandatory for staff.

Workers need a broad knowledge base of the many different surfaces they will encounter during a regular cleaning shift. These surfaces require a wide range of cleaning solutions so your equipment, chemicals, and personnel should all be versatile. Below are five tips to consider as your department looks to maximize investments, while keeping floors as well as carpeted areas in tip-top shape.

Tip #1 – Do Your Homework
Not all flooring and carpeting are the same and therefore, not all cleaning procedures will be effective. In fact, the wrong procedures can result in a multitude of problems. These issues include:
• Surface damage – visual and hidden
• Faded fibers or surfaces over time
• Harm to indoor air quality (IAQ)
• Employee and building occupant injuries
• Costly repairs
• And much more

For these reasons and others, facility managers and cleaning staff must do their homework and become familiar with the facility’s surfaces and how to maintain these areas. Although concrete, marble, stone, and other types of flooring may be present in schools and hospitals, vinyl composition tile (VCT) is a popular choice for areas throughout these settings. VCT is typically easy to maintain and is often selected due to its resiliency.

Facilities tend to enjoy the ease of ongoing maintenance attributes associated with VCT. For daily cleaning, VCT cleaning tasks usually consist of routine dry soil removal, such as through sweeping, vacuuming, or dust mopping and wet or damp mopping. An autoscrubber, which can apply solution, scrub, strip, clean, wet vacuum, and squeegee the floor dry all in one pass, can also be used.

As to carpeting, many commercial facilities, including schools and hospitals, utilize low-pile, looped synthetic fiber carpet, which is also relatively easy to maintain.

Doing your homework and properly identifying the floor surface or carpet fiber are imperative before attempting to clean and protect—shortcuts will set you back and might be expensive in the long-run. Using the wrong chemical, equipment, or procedures can have the reverse effect on prolonging floor attributes and carpet surfaces appearance. Be sure to read all manufacturers’ labeling and consult a distributor or expert as needed.

Tip #2 – Importance of Employee Buy-in
Equipment and tools should be multi-purpose and user-friendly. As important, employee training should be extensive. Be sensitive to the fact that cleaning is a very labor-intensive profession. In order to get the most out of employees and maximize your investments, provide employees with equipment that is quiet and ergonomic.

Remember, proper planning and procuring modern equipment and chemicals can only help extend floor finish cycles, carpet deep-cleanings, and long-term maintenance when used by trained professionals who understand the benefits of the cleaning programs.

Tip #3 – Select Top Products
Over the past 15 years, the U.S. cleaning industry has witnessed an explosion of product technology, information and chemical innovation. Frankly, changes to protect our workers, customers, students, patients, and building occupants were long overdue. In fact, the U.S. Department of Labor still ranks the use of some cleaning chemicals as among the top hazards in the professional cleaning industry.

In 2005, there were nearly 220,000 accidental poisonings, including 36 deaths, as a result of using or misusing cleaning chemicals, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers. Environmentally preferable floor care products of today are not only effective, compared to traditional products, but also help reduce the risk of illness and exposure to harmful floor care chemicals.

When damp or wet mopping, select microfiber pads, mopheads and cloths. These modern-day fabrics require less chemical to efficiently clean and are considered green. For mops, brooms, and other common floor care tools, make sure ergonomic features are included. Since daily cleaning is an important part of extending your floor’s protective layers, you will want to be sure that your employees are comfortable, safe, productive and focused.

Floor care chemicals of today, including finishes, are more durable compared to past offerings. Chemical manufacturers are using polymer technology that provides longer wear, better scuff resistance, a glossier appearance and an overall healthy shield. “And healthier, proven effective and environmentally preferable floor care products are now available,” says Mike Sawchuk, vice president of Enviro-Solutions, a leading manufacturer of Green cleaning products. “These products help Green floor care as they help protect the health of users and the environment.”

Tip #4 – Select Versatile Equipment
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) estimates that work-related musculoskeletal disorders account for 34 percent of all lost-workday injuries and illnesses. Therefore, be sure to select equipment, tools and accessories with ergonomic features to fit your workers. Additionally, be sure to seek out versatile equipment that can perform a multitude of tasks.

Multiple surface floor cleaning equipment, which can help maintain both hard surface and certain carpeted areas, are currently available. These machines offer quiet, high quality cleaning performance, versatility, ease of use and durability. Not only are these machines multi-surface solutions, but this equipment is also multi- purpose—washing, mopping, scrubbing, and drying in a single pass on virtually every kind of floor, even escalators and entrance matting.

As mentioned, hospitals and schools often house several different types of surfaces. These multi-surface machines are able to maintain wood, PVC, studded rubber, linoleum, marble, granite, stone, quarry tiles and ceramic floors.

Tip #5 – Routine Maintenance
The tasks your crews perform everyday also help cut the costs of floor care and carpet care. Vacuuming, for instance, with today’s vacuum cleaners, which many feature high-quality HEPA filtration, workers are able to capture tiny particulates that can harm air quality and floor surfaces. Extracting with lowmoisture carpet equipment can expedite drying times and limit damage and overwetting.

Eventually, stripping and refinishing will be needed. At that time, be sure cleaning crews use the correct procedures. If an autoscrubber is not being used, items your staff will need include:
• Gloves
• Chemical stripper
• Floor finish
• Mops to use with the stripper and fresh mops to apply the finish
• Two buckets, one for stripper and one for finish
• A wet/dry vacuum cleaner
• Air movers to promote drying
• A floor machine

In addition, black stripping pads are necessary. Black stripping pads attach to the base of the machine, allowing the floor care equipment to strip off the old finish, soils and grit so that a fresh sealer or finish can be applied.

A well-prepared and productive team can help extend refinishing cycles and costly repairs. Nowadays, many facilities are trying to stretch budget dollars. However, schools and hospitals that follow effective floor care and carpet care programs, described in the tips above, can save money without being detrimental to surfaces or fibers.

Rob Godlewski is the vice president of marketing for Powr-Flite.

Bonus Tip – Matting
Sports coaches often use the phrase, “The best offense is a good defense,” and the same can be true in facilities management. If your desire is to extend the life of your facility’s floors, prolong floor finish and delay deep-cleaning of carpeted areas, the placement of high-performance matting could be the best defense you can put on the field.

Strategically placed matting can prevent soils, debris and harmful contaminants from entering the facility and spreading. A high-performance matting system captures grit, sand, salt and other matter found in nature that would otherwise be tracked into a building and scuff, knick, scratch and damage floor surfaces.

However, the matting system’s length and placement are critical. Typically, health care buildings and school facilities will use matting, but often place only a few feet at entrances. The industry offers recommendations for high-performance matting placement and guidelines. A total of 15’ of matting is necessary.

Sectioned in three groups, these types of mats include:
• A scraper mat placed outside at entryways. This mat’s main function is to remove large debris.
• A wiper/scraper mat directly inside the door. This “middle” mat will remove remaining soils and initiate moisture removal from shoe bottoms.
• A wiper mat, the final line of defense, is necessary to remove any remaining moisture before occupants step onto a floor surface or carpet.

Matting that expands 15’ and offers the above qualities will allow the average person to step on the system four to six times on each foot before walking onto a building’s interior floor. The placement of high-performance matting will not only save a facility money in the short-term, such as through the need for less frequent cleaning (a Green benefit) since less moisture and soiling are entering, but also in the long-term by delaying costly restoration projects and protecting floor finish.

Christopher Tricozzi, Crown Mats and Matting.

Hit Counter

Sponsor

Your browser does not support inline frames or is currently configured not to display inline frames.

Sponsor

Corporate Member:

Individual Member:

American School & Hospital Facility magazine and FacilityManagement.com are educational tools that teach institutional facilities professionals and the building team to operate, maintain and design structures efficiently, economically, safely, securely and green. The editorial mission is to report on the topics, issues, trends and products that impact facilities management.