Reconditioning floors in senior care and assisted living centers Meeting the need for speed

Stripping floors with a scrubber drier? Absolutely doable: thanks to a non-slip, pH-neutral basic cleaning solution developed specifically for this purpose. It saves time, money, and more. Let’s take a look at how it’s done at the Haus Elisabeth residential care center in Herford, Germany.Now in its fifteenth year, the linoleum flooring of the Evangelical deaconry’s senior care and assisted living facility – 47 single rooms and ten double rooms – in Herford has no doubt seen better days. Manager Monika Kolbe understandably has no difficulty finding fault with floors looking greasy, milky, as if covered by a dull gray film, but shiny at the same time. The residents all feel similarly uneasy about the strangely glossy floor. How can it be safe to walk on that? Age and wear are not the only issues, either. The floor looks like it’s never been coated or stripped or otherwise properly cleaned according to the manufacturer’s instructions. All attempts to re-move the stubborn film layers and residue from acrylic and high gloss polymer dispersions, even switching over to a different service provider, have failed to revive the linoleum. “Our goal was to completely remove the inherited dirt and re-store the floor to its original condition. To achieve this, the plan was to apply a water-soluble polymer cleaning polish and permanently condense it with a high-speed machine. Essentially, to do just what the manufacturer recommends,” Hartmut Hagedorn, Technical Manager of the RWS janitorial service company in Enger, explains. “But then we hit a wall. We just couldn’t get rid of all the residue.” Four years ago, RWS was contracted to take care of maintenance cleaning at Haus Elisabeth, whose three residential sections accommodate approximately 70 seniors of all care levels. Six days a week, it’s 3,500 square meters that need to be kept ship-shape. Practically the entirety of the flooring at the facilities consists of linoleum, including the bedrooms, corridors, dining rooms, common rooms, and the function room with its café. Patent pending Like everyone around her, Monika Kolbe just wanted a floor that looks good and stays looking good, with just a hint of a sheen to give it that freshly cleaned appearance. It seemed this would remain wishful thinking until the cleaning contractor took an-other crack at the challenge, this time with a high-performance stripping agent for PVC and linoleum flooring developed by Wetrok: Speedclean. Oliver Beetz, Product Manager at the Swiss cleaning solutions company, attests to its ideal wetting properties and many other benefits. For instance, it is non-hazardous, pH-neutral and formulated (low-foam and non-slip) for use with a vacuum scrubber rather than a single-disc scrubber and wet vacuum cleaner combo. This means the floor can be stripped in one go and it takes just one person to get the job done – in much less time than was previously the case. Also, thanks to the neutral pH value, it is unnecessary to run multiple cleaning passes to get from a strongly basic to a neutral level. This saves even more time as well as water. Oliver Beetz, who was involved in the development process from the very outset, only has to point at the numbers: One person with a vacuum scrubber and Wetrok Speedclean – which already delivers better area performance than a single-disc machine to begin with – can get 200 square meters stripped and cleaned in approximately four hours. The conventional method requires two staffers for a total of 18 hours. Altogether, Oliver Beetz has calculated that the new process cuts cleaning time by as much as 75 percent, overall costs by a third, and water consumption by a third as well. A narrow time windowSpeed is particularly relevant when it comes to stripping and cleaning the floors in Haus Elisabeth, especially in the dining room. After the last residents have finished their evening meal and before the early birds sit down for breakfast, that’s a very tight time frame to get the job done and done right. Already, the team dispatched by cleaning contractor RWS is moving tables, chairs and other furniture into the corridor. Now, the room is being measured to determine the necessary amount of cleaning solution. Oliver Beetz, a cleaning services contractor and hygiene engineer, emphasizes that the stripping process requires just 300 milliliters of product per square meter. Though Speedclean is classified as non-hazardous (it causes no chemical burns and can be disposed of without concerns), the cleaning solution has a higher concentration than with other stripping agents when the ratio is 1:1. This entails safety precautions, so it is only natural for RWS employees Alex Leinweber and Michael Stürmer, supported by the Wetrok Regional Sales Manager, Jörg Pramschüfer, to don personal protective equipment, including goggles. No rinsing requiredAfter damp-mopping the floor to capture any surface dust, Alex Leinweber uses another mop to apply a matchstick-thick layer of Speedclean solution. “If at the end there’s still product left in the bucket, something isn’t quite right,” he explains. “The good news is that there’s no need to rewet the floor after the product has been dispersed. Twenty minutes later, the vacuum scrubber is called to action: a Discomatic Mambo with two pad holders fitted with green pads (medium hardness). The first pass is done without water. Here, Sinar Nahmet only needs to manually take care of the edges, which are hard to reach for the machine. Next comes a wet scrubbing cycle, which then allows the loosened coating fragments to be easily vacuumed. No further rinsing cycles are required with pH-neutral Speedclean (applied solution: 7.5, concentrated: 8 to 9). The lower water requirement has an effect on the drying time, too: Oliver Beetz quotes four to five hours for Speedclean where other products require at least twelve hours prior to refinishing the floor. Instead of a coating agent, Michael Stürmer applies a wet polish. Done. “The results speak for themselves”The floor looks great again after the treatment. All the old coat-ing residue has been completely removed and the linoleum restored to practically new condition. RWS Technical Manager Hartmut Hagedorn is impressed: “I have never seen a product that lets you remove all the legacy dirt in one single process.” His conclusion: Speedclean delivers excellent results in terms of time, money, and quality. Ulf Dreier, Operations Manager and Managing Director in the company’s health care department, highlights the financial aspect. “The considerable time savings are a compelling argument for us as well as for our customers.” Monika Kolbe, who heads the Haus Elisabeth center is satisfied, too. She finds the shorter time requirement and relatively low noise levels particularly significant. At the end of the day, “the results speak for themselves.” Heike Holland | heike.holland@holzmann-medien.de

Reconditioning floors in senior care and assisted living centers Meeting the need for speed

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