Carpet cleaning - spot cleaning - general

You could probably write a book on this.

The first thing to remember is that spots don't get better with age. The sooner you attack them the less effort to remove them, and the better the results.

Ideally, the person doing the spill would grab a paper towel immediately after the spill and blot the fluid gently. Similarly, any food dropped on the carpet should be picked up or vacuumed up immediately before it can stain the carpet.

(By the way, few things annoy me more than seeing one of my operations guys drop food on the floor and then cluelessly ignore it - I haven't fired any of them for this - but I've been sorely tempted. More than once, I might add.)

Failing that, it depends on the size of the spot. I have separate posts for red dye and iron removal. Pretty much anything else can be removed with a general purpose spot cleaner or, if too large or too long set, carpet cleaning techniques.

For small spots - follow label instructions - which in general say spray the spot with the spot remover, give it a few minutes of dwell time for the spot cleaner to attach to / emulsify the soil, and blot with a clean white (no dye to stain the carpet) cloth. Paper towels are usually ok too - but a cloth is a little better.

If the spot contains too great a volume of soil for a general purpose spotter escalate to any of the appropriate carpet cleaning techniques I describe below.

(We do use a briefcase sized extractor for larger spots. It functions exactly like the bigger extractors - very little set up time compared to full sized equipment tho.)

You may also find that when you have cleaned the spot, you have the original color where the spot used to be, and darker, soiled carpet all around it. This means you waited too long to clean the carpet, and now it's time to extract the whole area.

Wicking is a separate topic I'll handle in a separate post.

Bob

Carpet cleaning - How to schedule - how often to do ...

It depends.

The first question is, how dirty does it get ? On the residential side, we have never worn shoes in my house, kids weren't allowed to eat in carpeted areas, no pets in residence and we vacuum pretty thoroughly - the carpets aren't dirty and don't need to be cleaned - never have been in 24 years. (They are however a very unfashionable '80's beige and pile)

In commercial cleaning world tho most people let their employees wear shoes, drink coffee at their desk, and so on tho, so eventually the carpets have to be cleaned.

Not all shoes are equally dirty however.

If employees walk in from a foundry, brick factory, metal bender, construction site, parking lot etc with oil, soot, dust, snow and mud on their shoes the carpet will get dirty quicker and need cleaning more often. Similarly in retail situations where thousands of people might walk in from a parking lot covered in snow, ice melting compounds, slush, or rain the carpet will get dirty faster.

That's why Target stores have tile floors in the high traffic areas - carpet near the entries would get impossibly dirty within hours of opening.

That's why factories, trucking companies, and so on also usually use tile floors or sealed concrete floors in areas close to doors used by production employees.

That's also why we use entrance matting (see separate post).

So the first answer is - don't even have carpet in situations where you are going to have to clean it frequently if you can avoid it - the appearance of the building and your costs will be better with some other type of surface.

Second, not all areas of the building get equally dirty. Hence the high soil areas need to be cleaned more often than the areas farther removed from entries and other sources of soil.

So the second answer is that you should schedule the cleaning of different parts of the building at different frequencies.

Third, winter is dirtier than summer in our corner of the world - so if you have a budget to clean the carpet twice a year you might do it in January and April (midwinter and end of winter) rather than in June and December (mid year and end of year.)

Once you get these concepts, the rest is just details.

For instance, in class "A" office buildings we often see a carpet cleaning program something like monthly cleaning of main floor lobby carpets during the winter, quarterly in the summer, weekly cleaning of any carpeted elevators where soil tends to get concentrated, monthly cleaning of any lunchroom carpets, quarterly cleaning of remaining common areas, traffic lanes cleaned once per year in the interior of the building, and on call or annual cleaning of offices and areas outside the traffic patterns.

A typical program for a single floor single occupant "B" building might be three cleanings of the lobby and lunchrooms in the winter, one or none in the summer, and a three year cycle for the office areas. The savings realized by only cleaning the low soil areas every three years pays for the more necessary and frequent cleaning of the high soil areas - a much better outcome than using the entire budget to do a once per year 100% cleaning for instance.

One can further modify (complicate ??) the schedule by adding less expensive "dry" or "bonnet" cleaning options in place of extraction for some of the interim cleanings. (see posts)

Just as an aside - I've never been able to satisfy myself that the extra carpet life you get from frequent cleaning of the less dirty areas saves you more money than it costs by delaying replacement of the carpet. Clearly the highly soiled areas need to be cleaned frequently for appearance reasons. Also soil is basically "gritty" or abrasive, and if not removed will tear the carpet fibers, accelerating wear.

Note also that frequent - daily or more than daily - vacuuming to remove the gritty stuff does more to prolong the carpets life than the annual "deep cleaning", but once the grit gets to deeply imbedded for the vacuum to remove, "remedial" or "restorative" carpet cleaning is necessary.

Bob

Back Pack Vacuums - how to test vs uprights.

There is all kinds of test literature telling us that back pack vacuums, besides being faster, also do a better job of lifting soil from carpets than upright vacuums in commercial cleaning environments.

Noone believes it - no beater bar ! - can't be true !

Including my janitorial operations staff - until ........

I split our lobby in half one winters day when there was plenty of sand in the carpet.

I vacuumed (had them vacuum actually) 1/2 with the back pack and the other 1/2 with the upright.

Then I went over each of the two just vacuumed areas with the OTHER vacuum.

No sound of sand being picked up by the upright - the back pack apparently got it all.

Lots of rattling in the back pack tho - apparently it was picking up stuff the upright had missed.

Lesson learned and operations staff convinced.

Bob

Microfiber

Actually I got my first microfiber cloth at least 15 years ago from a French 3M chemist that was visiting headquarters and tied in a sales call to my janitorial supplies distributor.

Was invented in France apparently - was kind of a product in search of an application for quite a while - assume it is off patent the last few years since all manufactures now make or source microfiber mops, dustcloths, etc.

For about the first 10 years the applications were limited to eye glasses cleaners - which worked nicely - I think I still have my original one from that meeting 15 years ago.

Turns out because of the topology of the fibers microfiber cloths pick up and retain something like 99 % of the dirt they touch.

This turned out to have application in the commercial cleaning.

This is way better than conventional dusting cloths, mops and dustmops.

Hence a janitor can get better results with one pass of microfiber than you can with multiple passes of conventional rag cleaning apparatus'.

This either gives you a cleaner building or a higher productivity from not having to repeatedly clean the same surface.

We've been standardized on microfiber for these reasons for over 2 years.

Only real issue is logistical (and financial) - standard operating procedure is to brush or wring out conventional rag cleaning mops and cloths. Microfiber won't release the soil unless you run it thru a washing machine. You have to either have on site washing machines you can use (not time effective anyway) or a lot of inventory in microfiber so you can go for a week or so, take them home, run a lot of them thru the washing machine together, and still have extra microfiber left at the cleaning customers' sites for that nites cleaning. After a short time tho, the higher productivity more than pays for the up front investment in extra cloths.

You are also seeing these in consumer versions in Target, supermarkets, drugstores, etc. Buy them - they work as advertised.

Bob

Windex, 409 and other houshold cleansers

Nothing wrong with them.

In fact, they are pretty much the same stuff as the commercial cleaning stuff we use.

Expensive tho. We buy glass cleaner concentrate for about $9.00 per gallon - dilutes out to 7 gallons ready to use - $1.42 per gallon or $0.35 per quart.

A short quart (28 oz) of Windex will run you about $1.50 at Target.

The math is even more compelling when you look at janitorial industry margins - a normal mainstream mid sized commercial cleaner runs a pre tax profitability of about 7 % of sales - and chemical and equipment costs are about 2.5 % of revenues. Quadruple your chemical costs and you are out of business.

(Cleaning Management Magazine and other trade periodicals publish these janitorial industry operating cost ratios from periodic surveys.)

For a variety of reasons our janitorial franchisees run (at least the data they are showing me) much higher ROS's - but the math is still pretty compelling.

That said, we can't convince everyone of this, so we put Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS sheets) for Windex and 409 in every building we start. You can get MSDS sheets for most such products at the manufacturers web site if you find something else you really like to use, by the way. Target however will just give you a puzzled look when you ask for an MSDS sheet.

And, since if you screw up your planning, realize you ran out of glass cleaner at midnite, further realize that the commercial chemical janitorial supply distributors all closed at 5 PM, and need to get some door glass cleaned, you can always go to Cub and get an emergency supply. So there is a legitimate need for these MSDS sheets.

Bob

Flu season - schools

Obviously schools and day cares are festering pestholes of infection.

Just kidding.

But the average office building has about 200 square feet per person.

I think in Minnesota you need about 80 feet per child in a licensed day care - about 2 and 1/2 times the density in an office building.

My parish school, is as I recall 24,000 feet or so for 320 or so kids. About 75 feet per person - again more than twice as congested as the environments where most of us spend our days.

Add in that half of this space is unused at any given time (gyms, lunchrooms, special purpose rooms / non - classroom space) and you can see that these kids are in pretty darn close proximity.

Thus, even with good hand washing discipline (unlikely) and repeated cleaning of "touch points" (see other posting ) there is still going to be a lot higher chance of contagion than in the rest of the world.

Probably the only place more congested is .........

..........drum roll..........

............... a medical clinic waiting room ?

There are studies tho that show a 30% to 50% reduction in absenteeism in schools that do a daily desk cleaning in addition to touch point cleaning with one of our strategic partner's (Kaivac) Kaifly horizontal surface cleaning tools.

Ooops - not in the budget - we're talking janitorial labor costs of $10 - $20 per classroom per nite - $4,000 per month plus for the school mentioned above - unless you get free labor - ? make the kids do it ?

Bob

Studies were done in Ohio - and they have been replicated elsewhere.

Flu season - touch points

You will read plenty of stuff about washing your hands frequently in the press - which is probably the number one thing you can do to avoid getting and transmitting the flu.

If there is a serious outbreak, I'm thinking of giving my employees those little fabric type surgical masks that Japanese tourists wear when they go to third world countries (like Minnesota - saw a bunch of them in the airport wearing 'em the last time I picked someone up - didn't realize this town was so dangerous.)

(Subsequent development = I just saw that H1N1 is too small for the cheapy masks pores - you have to buy the $5 mask instead of the $.50 mask to get pores small enough to catch this virus. That said, the pores are big enough to catch things like moisture particles from sneezes (in bound or out bound) that contain and spread the virus. Limiting access to the substrate that contains the virus can't hurt, so I'm leaving the above remark in the blog.)

Beyond that tho, our "Cleaning For Health" training protocol emphasizes focusing on "touch points"

-Doorknobs

-Towel holders - those laser towel dispensers are a great infection control idea,

-Faucets

-Flush toggles

-Light switches

Additional touch points are microwave and refrigerator handles, coffee pot handles, shared phone headsets, handrails and elevator buttons.

A) As a commercial cleaner these are things we want to wipe 100% of the time - whether cosmetically necessary or not.

B) As a user you may want to use elbows, paper towels, toilet paper, etc to avoid touching with your hands. Be especially careful not to put hands to eyes, mouth, nose, etc after touching "touch points" if we do get into a serious flu epidemic. This is one situation where those desk top hand sanitizer dispensers make a lot of sense.

C) Don't get too paranoid tho. These are "non - porous" surfaces in almost all cases. Most infectious agents can't live real long on a non - porous surface because of the absence of moisture and / or food.

HIV dies just about instantly outside the host. E Coli a few hours or a day or so later. Flu (the title topic) can live for several days tho, and hepatitis for long periods of time.

Bob