H1N1 - how long does it live outside the body ?

Up to 24 hours on dry non - porous surfaces.

Up to 72 hours in select moist situations. (Per Dr. Charles Gerba - Link )

This came up in the technical sessions of our franchisee meeting this week.

What is kind of interesting is we've done a number of top to bottom decontaminations of day care centers and educational institutions with flu epidemics - at considerable cost to the customer.

But if you can stay closed for 24 hours a lot of the H1N1 is gone. If you can stay closed for 72 hours it will all be gone.

While that sounds like a non - starter, if your facility closes for the weekend at 5 PM on Friday, and reopens at 8 AM Monday, that's 63 hours - almost enough for a complete die off.

If you shut down at noon on Friday, it's almost 72 hours.

And if most of your people have the flu, might as well ?

Cool huh ?

Until the first person sneezes on Monday and recontaminates the place ?

Which is why staying home if you have H1N1 is the best thing you can do for you employer.

(Never thought I'd hear myself saying that.)

Bob

Odor control bathrooms, etc.

Visited the Newaire people at the ISSA janitorial supply show last month.

Saw the whole product line - specifically an ozone generator designed to be wired right into a wall to run intermittently 24 / 7. It's about the size of a 4 plug electrical outlet.

Very cool idea.

They claim you could put it in a bedroom or other area where people spend long periods of time with no risk from the ozone - because of the tiny dose.

I wouldn't - plus it's probably unnecessary in those type of situations - not that much odor - usually.

But it would be great in bathrooms, kitchens, over a cat box or pet bed - areas that often generate odor.

Especially in an office or plant bathroom, this is a great idea - lots of people use those rooms - lots of odor generation - but nobody (we hope) hangs out in there for 24 straight hours - so absolutely minimal inhalation of ozone by any one individual - but it's working all the time to destroy odors.

Their car cigarette lighter ozone generator (similar to the old Sharper Image one) is probably a good idea if you travel with smokers - while a little more exposure to ozone would result, I'm guessing the ozone would be less risky than breathing in the second hand smoke organic solvents it neutralizes.

For more data on how ozone works, see my original post on ozone generators.

Bob

Carpet cleaning - how to deal with wicking

Wicking is pretty common in situations where the original stain involved a high volume of liquid. The liquid evaporates, but the color (coffee, soda, juice or some beverage usually) penetrates the underlayers of the carpet and spreads far wider than the visible entry spot.

Note the words high volume - a full glass of soda or a full cup of coffee - not a little splash.

We then clean the visibly spotted area - successfully remove the stain from the visibly spotted area - but leave the residual dyes, soils, etc all around the surrounding area.

The frustrating (but also kind of neat) thing is that when the underlayer soil gets moist again - often from ambient humility - it returns to the surface thru the entry point - not directly above the "well" of stain / source - and reestablishes the stain in the exact same spot and size.

Has something to do with the chemistry of the carpet - I've never seen an explanation of exactly what the process is - but I've seen the problem way too many times.

Now you repeat the cleaning of the stain - visible area only. It gets wet again at some later date. Process repeats.

Commercial cleaning crew frustrated - customer unhappy - not good.

Only solution I've been able to come up with is total war. Instead of cleaning just the spot, you:

A) Clean a wide radius around the spot.

B) Saturate the area with many times as much water as you would normally use.

C) Agitate aggressively with a carpet brush or bonnet (other posts) to emulsify / bind the soil to the detergent / carpet cleaning chemical.

D) Extract multiple times - possibly continuing to add more water - until the intake water no longer shows any color whatsover from the soil.

That said - 2 observations -

1) Water is bad for carpet. It's ok to put a lot in - as long as you take it all out. Well maintained carpet cleaning equipment with good water lift and multiple extractions are necessary to avoid damaging the carpet.

2) This whole time consuming and expensive process could have been avoided. If the minute the spill occured someone started blotting and kept soaking up the fluid with towels, cloths or paper towels and removed the majority of the fluid by blotting, it wouldn't have spread out thru the neighboring underlayer. Also, less total soil would remain in the carpet to be removed. Thus one or two treatments of the stain would suffice to restore the carpet to pretty close to clean.

Bob

Lunch rooms - how to choose the right type of floor.

Most people put either carpet or tile in a lunchroom.

From a commercial cleaner's viewpoint, the best situation is a little of both.

The "high spill" areas - the 2 feet or so around food preparation counters, microwaves, sinks etc should be tile - preferably ceramic. These areas will never look good with carpet as there are too many incidental spills to keep up with.

Unless the clientele spills a lot (small children, very disgruntled employees) the area under the chairs and tables should be carpet, as it's easier to maintain and has a lower probability of a slip and fall accident if there is a small spill.

Vinyl tile should never be used. Tough to keep a finish on it. In the "spill zone" the constant acid bath from food acids will strip the finish off the tile, hence my preference for ceramic. In the seating area the chair feet and table feet will strip the finish in a few days in most situations, also leaving an undesirable appearance, hence my preference for carpet, or failing that ceramic tile.

Ceramic tile is more expensive to install - but in a lunchroom the cost to maintain vinyl tile at a reasonable level of appearance is prohibitive.

Bob

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