Building Maintenance, Refurbishment & Grounds
There’ll always be pressure to make it more sustainable
When you just wanted it to be effective and cheap
A
bout fifty years ago, cleaning a school usually meant making it smell of disinfectant, sweeping up the detritus of the previous day and polishing everything within an inch of its life. Attitudes and priorities have changed, and the focus has shifted, so that now the emphasis is on mechanised scrubbing to remove dirt and infection, speed to keep the cost down and maybe a bit of mechanised polishing. Schools are bigger and have mostly vinyl or composition floors. They also have to be a lot more careful than they used to be about getting blamed for accidents, so can’t afford to leave floors wet after cleaning. We talked to Gordon McVean, Sales & Marketing Director at Truvox International, about the purchasing patterns for school cleaning, whether by major cleaning contractors, such as Albany Healthy Schools, or by the schools themselves. Some 60% of the UK’s educational establishments are cleaned by in-house cleaners, engaged either by the school or by its local authority, possibly because in-house cleaners are more likely than contractors to accept providing extra work or flexible cover to support the school’s special needs and events. Gordon McVean makes the point that purchasers ascribe considerable importance to the weight of floor-cleaning machines and how easy they are to get into lifts or up stairs.
“This is probably because a majority of cleaners in schools are women” he said. “Certainly, the three sizes of Truvox Multiwash are popular machines with schools.”
Chris Ryan, Group Manager of Cleaning Services for Staffordshire County Council, explained that it was primarily the simplicity of using the Truvox Multiwash on notoriously labour-intensive safety flooring that prompted their initial purchase, and the effectiveness and reliability of the Multiwash that encouraged the council to buy more.
“We had trialled various alternative contra- rotating machines, which we found not to be as easy to use or as effective as the Multiwash” he said. “For our school cleaning services the Multiwash is the most user-friendly, easy to maintain and cost-effective multi-purpose machine available.”
The Truvox Multiwash washes, mops, scrubs and dries on both hard and soft floor coverings in a single pass and leaves floors ready to walk on in minutes – essential for health and safety compliance. It is extremely effective on ‘difficult’ floors like non-slip safety floors, low pile carpets, entrance matting and escalators. Easy to use and manoeuvre, the Multiwash has quickly interchangeable brushes, with a range of different brushes available, and easily accessible and
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removable tanks to make filling, emptying and cleaning straightforward.
Manoeuvrability is also very important to schools, especially where older buildings have had to be adapted to handle a much larger number of students. The recently launched Truvox Orbis Battery Scrubber is a compact scrubber drier for small or middle sized areas, capable of work in confined spaces and narrow passages. Powered by a minimum-maintenance rechargeable 24V Gel battery, the Orbis Battery scrubber is particularly useful to contract cleaners because the battery power frees them from the need to gain access to power points to be able to do their work. Although compact, the Orbis battery scrubber has a 17 litre solution tank with adjustable solution flow and a 22-litre dirty water tank, probably the largest capacity on the market for a scrubber drier of this size.
Increasingly, school cleaning purchasers are thinking green when buying cleaning materials and sustainable when specifying how their cleaning is done. Health and Safety is paramount, but buying machines that use less energy is becoming a major issue. With the environmental lobby in hot pursuit on every issue, no cleaner would dare do otherwise.
uwww.truvox.com June 2010
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