EXPERT ADVICE
Taking The Shine Off Technology
Everything wears away eventually. But cleaning shouldn’t make matters worse by taking the shine off floors through unnecessarily abrasive cleaning. James White, Managing Director of Denis Rawlins Ltd tells us more.
Dust to dust. It’s the immutable law of nature, and why there will always be a need to clean. As the materials all around us wear away, they make their own fine contribution to the dust already blowing in the wind – before it too is deposited on the surfaces that we have to clean.
But that fine wearing away has another consequence, which has been drawn to my attention on a series of recent site visits. The facility managers in these buildings had a problem. Their vinyl floors were losing their shine and seemed to be becoming ever harder to clean.
This is a problem that can have many causes. An inadequate cleaning regime and/or entrance matting will allow grit and other forms of dirt to break down the protective seal on a hard floor. Or skimping on maintenance can leave a floor defenceless against penetrating dirt.
But in at least some cases the fault lies not with neglect but the opposite – over-zealous cleaning and over- engineering.
Step forward the scrubber dryer – a versatile and sophisticated machine. Its more advanced versions can tackle a variety of floors – from tiles and marble to vinyl and timber – leaving them clean and virtually dry in one pass. But their pads and, sometimes, brushes take a minute amount of the surface off vinyl and wooden floors. In time this removes the protective
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shine that protects the floor, leaving a more abraded and sometimes porous surface.
The floor now becomes marked more easily and dirt sticks to the surface more strongly. This deterioration will be accelerated by using pads or brushes that are more abrasive than required, or by an unskilled operator, applying excessive force or prolonged action in certain areas.
You may be thinking: “Well, that’s the good thing about good old-fashioned mopping!” And you’d be right. The only good thing about hand mopping is that it doesn’t abrade the surface of a floor, but then it doesn’t clean it either. As readers aware of our ‘Chop the Mop’ campaign will know, we at Denis Rawlins Ltd are spreading the word that mopping only spreads the dirt.
Looking at these two polar opposites of cleaning methodology, it is fairly obvious that the answer to cleaning hard floors without abrading them is to mop and vacuum dry. Mopping spreads the cleaning solution and the vacuum removes it along with the dirt it contains. There are systems that do this in one pass, and it doesn’t necessarily require sophisticated or expensive technology.
The OmniFlex AutoVac is just such a system. Of course, I mention OmniFlex because Denis Rawlins is the UK agent for this Crossover cleaning system that helps even premises on tight budgets to progress to efficient and hygienic cleaning.
But it’s also highly relevant because of independent scientific testing on vinyl flooring in the US that compared the performance of the OmniFlex unit, both with hand mopping and a scrubber dryer machine.
This three-way test produced intriguing results that back up our calls for science-based cleaning – the other plank of our Chop the Mop campaign. The microfibre mop performed poorly, removing at best 50% of bacteria from the floor, before – unsurpisingly – re-contaminating clean areas, so its overall effectiveness dropped to 24%.
Meanwhile, there was nothing to choose in performance between the OmniFlex and scrubber dryer, each of which achieved 99% removal. As the scientists noted, the equipment’s ability to remove soils via suction was instrumental in eliminating the bacteria from the floor and minimising cross-contamination.
Of course, the boffins weren’t measuring abrasion, the machines’ running and capital costs, or indeed the wear inflicted on the vinyl surface and its implications for serviceability and future cleaning. It’s up to us humble cleaning specialists and facilities managers to make those whole-life calculations.
www.rawlins.co.uk
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