School-cleaning Successes Worth Sharing

Whether you rely on an in-house staff or a building service contractor to clean your school’s floors, there’s never been a better time to know what successes other facility managers are experiencing and how you might improve on your own current practices. Innovation to better clean carpeted floors, improved cleaning productivity, incredible cost savings—these are just a few recent stories we’ve gathered from across the country about how Advance is revolutionizing the way schools clean.

Going soft on floors, but tough on clean.

The first school that reached out had recently started leveraging the power of the Advance ES4000™ carpet cleaner. This versatile riding machine provides a total carpet care solution, eliminating the need for multiple machines and enhancing productivity up to 400% compared to walk-behind extractors. It performs daily cleaning, low-moisture cleaning, restorative extraction and more—all at a quiet decibel level no louder than a person speaking.

For education facilities with significant carpeted space, the capabilities of the ES4000 allow you to maintain a high level of clean, even in high traffic areas. The school, in this instance, is deriving maximum benefits from the versatility of the ES4000. The multi-purpose platform allows them to use a single machine to conduct daily cleaning as well as periodic touch ups and deep extraction.     Not only will the ES4000 allow the district to maintain a healthy, clean environment for its students and faculty, it will also extend the life of the carpet—ultimately helping the district to save money.

Standing up for productivity.

The second story came from a school district that took the Advance SC1500™ standup scrubber with REV™ orbital scrubbing technology for a spin—and loved it. The REV system is known industry-wide for providing uniform, deep-scrubbing performance and even single-pass, chemical-free floor finish removal.

Reporting steadily rising levels of production—including hallways getting cleaned more frequently and dreaded floor projects becoming simpler, safer tasks—this particular facility manager has since made the SC1500 with REV a mainstay throughout the entire school district.

Getting REVved up about cost-savings and safety.

The final story came out of a school district in Texas where operation managers were also discovering the power of REV technology. With 152 classrooms in their high school, every hour of labor and gallon of chemical added up to significant costs. Fortunately, once they adopted REV equipment, things started changing right away: stripping one classroom floor went from requiring three people and 1.5 hours to one person needing only a half hour. The resulting labor savings was over 85 percent!

In addition, in the previous year there had been three slip and fall incidents, which cost the district $70,000. With REV’s chemical-free floor stripping, no such instances occurred and the district actually finished three weeks early—saving on both wages and air conditioning costs too.

Wrapping up

Schools will always prove to be challenging environments to clean: high traffic, tight turnarounds and tough budgets are only a few of the many considerations operations managers regularly make. But as a primary solutions provider for educational facilities nationwide, Advance is finding that, as more schools share their successes in best practices for cleaning, the better off everyone will be. To learn more about Advance cleaning solutions for education, visit www.advance-us.com.

Setting K-12 School Cleaning Standards

This article was originally published by Contracting Profits. 

Elementary and high school facilities across the United States pose health risks to students and staff due to the lack of a standardized approach to assessing the effectiveness of their cleaning regimen. A vast majority of facilities judge cleaning by sight, smell and even touch. But this approach is woefully inadequate in this age of MRSA, norovirus and other infectious agents that cannot be detected by the senses alone.

Realizing this serious deficiency, ISSA and the Cleaning Industry Research Institute (CIRI) entered into a joint venture, commissioning an independent body of scientists led by Dr. Richard Shaughnessy, University of Oklahoma – Tulsa, and Dr. Gene Cole, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, to perform research intended to provide three deliverables.

The first goal was to identify an objective, quantitative method of measuring cleanliness. After thoroughly reviewing various devices, the researchers concluded that ATP (adenosine triphosphate) meters are a valid, relatively simple, rapid and affordable measure of the level of cleanliness of critical interior surfaces in schools. Just as important, these devices were found to be reliable and consistent in their measurements across geographic and climatic zones.

Secondly, ISSA and CIRI tasked the researchers with producing reasonable range values for measuring levels of cleanliness in schools across three different ATP meters, representing a standardized and quantitative approach to measuring clean. With this step, “cleanliness” was defined based on ATP-RLU (relative light units) values.

Now, ISSA and CIRI will use this information to establish a practical standard and protocol that will empower schools to validate their cleaning regimen, as well as help them more efficiently allocate their limited resources for cleaning and maintenance. This protocol — the Clean Standard: K-12 — is currently under development, but is expected to be finalized by June 2013.

Read the full article here to learn more about the purpose of school cleaning standards. 

Satisfying Cleaning Requirements in Education Facilities

Each school day, some 56 million students and 6 million staff study and word in our nation’s schools. Over the last several years, many states have passed laws to address issues related to indoor air quality and to replace outdated cleaning methods with new green cleaning programs. Advance has led the industry in the development of innovative floor cleaning equipment that helps schools meet state the new more stringent cleaning requirements, maximize productivity while staying within budget constraints.

Educators agree that maintaining a clean school helps students stay healthy and learn, while also protecting the health of all staff and increasing the lifespan of facilities. Advance offers cutting edge technologies such as REV™orbital scrubbing technology to help cleaning professionals achieve maximum levels of productivity with a minimal environmental impact. REV scrubbing technology allows users to remove several layers of floor finish with plain tap water. Because floor removal is one of the most time consuming and hazardous cleaning process undertaken in schools, REV can help remove the most caustic chemicals from your schools and eliminate many of the slip and fall incidents that cleaning professionals suffer while removing finish and recoating floors.

To learn more about effective cleaning procedures for education facilities, visit: www.advance-us.com/industries/commercial/education.aspx

Trends in Facility Cleaning with Joe Agron, Editor-in-Chief and Associate Publisher of American School & University Magazine, at ISSA 2011

Joe Agron discusses current and future trends in facility cleaning and maintenance in education institutions at the Advance ISSA 2011 booth. Joe Agron is the Editor-in-Chief and associate publisher of American School & University Magazine.