Flexible Cleaning: Detergent and Water Cleaning

All facilities, regardless of whether it’s a university or grocery store, require hard-floor cleaning machines that are both environmentally preferred and flexible enough to handle a wide variety of cleaning applications. With recent technology advancements, automatic scrubbers with flexible cleaning capabilities are now available for cleaning professionals and facility managers. Today, we will look at these machines’ ability to use multiple types of cleaners and water only.

Ideally, a “green and clean” scrubber enables facilities to use any type of detergent or cleaning fluid—including green-certified cleaners. Machines that are designed to use a proprietary cleaning fluid only or water only are not conducive to the variable cleaning practices used in many buildings today. For example, a facility may choose a neutral cleaner for routine daily cleaning, but prefer to scrub with a stronger detergent for deeper cleaning weekly or monthly. Or a facility might use water-only cleaning interspersed with detergent-cleaning to gain the benefits of each; detergent-based cleaning gets into pores and removes more soil, while the intermittent water-only cleaning washes residual detergent out of surface pores to improve floor appearance. Once detergent is washed out of the pores, the water-only process no longer provides the same cleaning benefit. For porous floors, a good practice may be to alternate cleaning methods—detergent and no detergent—to keep floors looking their best.

Stay tuned for next week’s blog post on automatic floor scrubbers with the ability to change detergents while scrubbing!