Project Cleaning For Schools And Universities: Establish Time-To-Task

This article was originally published in Cleaning & Maintenance Management.

Last week, we discussed a few suggestions for project cleaning. This week, we will focus on establishing an appropriate time for each cleaning task. 

Use ISSA’s 540 Cleaning Times Book & Calculator to assess the time required for various tasks.

For example: As you prepare to strip hard floors, understand that dust mopping in classrooms is often slower than vacuuming, as the productivity of an 18-inch dust mop is less than 7,000 square feet per hour, compared to a backpack vacuum with a hard floor tool which ranges between 7,000 and 10,000 square feet per hour.

Vacuuming also removes fine, gritty soil from crevices for thorough, deep cleaning. When scrubbing floors, autoscrubbers reduce drudgery, improve results and free up human resources for other work. With a range of sizes and configurations available, there is an autoscrubber for most maintenance budgets.

This is especially meaningful when you consider that an autoscrubber consolidates a number of procedures into one — mopping, scrubbing, rinsing, squeegeeing and vacuuming — lowering costs, while providing superior cleaning and greater floor safety.

With the trend toward downsizing in large and small maintenance firms, automating floorcare is an idea whose time has come. Answering the call, manufacturers now provide autoscrubbers ranging in cleaning width from 17 inches up, with compact designs proving practical on even modest-sized floors. Hefty productivity gains allow greater floor coverage with fewer personnel and in less time compared to manual floorcare.

Floor production rates for light scrubbing with 17-inch and 20-inch scrubbers average 18,500 and 20,500 square feet per hour respectively. Actual cleaning speed will depend on usage conditions, but increases of two to 10 times over mop-and-bucket maintenance are common. There are even robotic scrubbers available for unattended floorcare, and propane-powered stripping machines for large areas needing rapid coverage.

There are also low cost dispense-and-vacuum platforms that enable dispensing floor cleaning solution, scrubbing, then vacuuming the solution off the floor and from grout lines. These enable wise use of resources on a budget.

Check back next week when we will focus on scheduling and how to work with other departments to efficiently get the job done.