MATERIAL SOLUTIONS


Two turns of strong porous clothing to give powerful vacuum suction and dry clothing


Minimise moisture retention of sheets to maximise productivity


Resilient springs always give good roll-to-bed fit to maximise heat transfer


Clothe each roll to give an exact fit to each curved bed


Need vacuum to each roll in the range 30-90Pa


to remove water vapour


Maintain roll to bed pressure within manufacturer’s


recommended range


Use steam traps which give both continuous discharge and air venting


TUNING UP: Key points to check when tuning the ironer


Continuous supply of dry steam at correct pressure essential


of automatic terminators at 2% - 5% residual moisture content (to eliminate the harshness and greying formerly caused by regular over-drying). When these are coupled with monitoring and optimisation of de-watering in the membrane press or washer extractor, the results in whiteness, softness, energy efficiency and productivity have been remarkable. For the first time ever, we have heard reports of customers ringing the laundry praising the change in towel processing – what an impact!


Laundry management All this does not come for free! It demands changes at the top. Laundry supervisors are generally very proficient at production planning and keeping everyone on their toes. They are less effective at making the checks needed to keep ironers at their maximum efficiency, such as monitoring and optimising time at pressure in the membrane press, or measuring and optimising moisture retention from the washer extractor. The best person to keep on top of these is probably the laundry engineering team, but this is frequently only one person in a small laundry and the post might not exist at all!


Care home OPLs and cruise liner laundries


Perhaps the most important opportunity facing care homes and cruise liners right now is the chance offered by low temperature washing to introduce disinfection in every wash. Care homes in the UK, amazingly, face no legal requirement to routinely disinfect each wash load but are covered in HTM01- 04. A few do use implied thermal disinfection and many use ozone disinfection, both of which are effective but this needs checking regularly. Care homes that rely on only a four-hour shift for laundry staff find it difficult to fit all the work into the time available and so use main wash temperatures much lower than 65C or 71C. This not only saves staff costs and processing time, but it also minimises energy consumption; both are particularly valuable, especially as many care home washers use electric heating elements, which are slow and expensive to run. The effect of poor disinfection has been failure to prevent cross infection of flu bugs, Covid, C diff. and even the common cold. Many cruise liners also fail to disinfect in every wash, even for pillowcases, towels and table napkins and even during infection outbreaks such as of Norovirus and Covid.


Now is the time to put this right with no significant cost increases apart from the necessary chemistry involved.


Conclusion


This is where the leadership of the laundry management comes in. To achieve the major advances described for the large laundry has meant engineering teams who are trained to take process optimisation in their stride, with frequent checks and monitoring systems. In the largest rental laundries working 24/7, there are teams of engineers on duty with clear briefs from either the Chief Engineer or perhaps from the Production Manager. We now need one person in each small establishment able to understand the opportunities described in this article, with the leadership skills needed to sell these concepts, both to the decision makers on the Board and the team on the laundry floor. The changes needed will not happen by themselves and it is not enough simply to give the engineer or manager a copy of this article and say: “Get on with it!”. You will need someone with the ability to inspire the entire team with the new direction of travel and the enthusiasm to get to the destination we have outlined.


If you have a problem that you think LTC Worldwide can help with, or that you feel would make a good subject for Material Solutions, please call T: +44 (0)1943 816 545 or E: enquiries@ltcworldwide.com or W:www.ltcworldwide.com


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