No job too big, no job too small - rationell reinigen Gebäudedienste

The Müller Company has stood out as a highly professional organization in Heidelberg’s grounds maintenance landscape for 30 years now. Day in, day out, winter and summer, rain or shine, its fifty employees serve both residential and corporate customers. Their not-so-secret weapon: a fleet of forty machines and vehicles, including a versatile attachment carrier with a 16-piece modular assortment that helps to get any job done in any season.The bar for grounds maintenance services is set much higher today than when the Müller Company was founded in 1983: “Customer demands have rapidly evolved in recent years. Take winter clearing, for instance, which now involves removing every last bit of snow, ice and sludge down to the asphalt and has become a standard request from business customers,” explains Bernd Müller, the company’s founder. The reason for insisting on such thorough clearing is understandable: maximum safety on all walkways and thoroughfares is a must. “Work-related accident prevention is high on the list of priorities nowadays, just look at the number of security and disaster prevention officers in municipal administrations and larger enterprises,” adds Steffen Ungerer, the company’s Managing Director. “This new way of thinking has had a major impact on service providers like ourselves. And it’s been positive in the sense that our order book is fuller and our customer relationships have grown stronger.” The Heidelberg University Hospital, probably one of Müller’s most demanding customers, especially in the cold season, perfectly illustrates the point. Virtually a city within the city, the medical center extends over a total of 94 hectares (approximately 233 acres) in the Neuheim district, just across the Neckar River from downtown Heidelberg. Besides numerous specialty departments, like the trauma surgery clinic, the ‘Kopfklinik’ that focuses on the head and neck, or the National Center for Tumor treatment (NCT), all of which enjoy renown far beyond the city limits of Heidelberg, the vast grounds are also home to the university faculties. In other words, you have hospital staff, patients, visitors, students, and of course ambulances crossing the streets and walkways day and night. That is why a Müller technician scrutinizes the weather radar all day long during the winter months, keeping a watchful eye out for snow and ice hazards. Should the worst-case scenario happen, you can be sure the operational action steps will unfold like clockwork. “There simply is no room for compromise when you are responsible for the care of sensitive areas such as these. When the weather turns or there’s an emergency, we need to be able to count on our people and our gear not just 100 percent, but 150 percent,” explains Bernd Müller. Always preparedWhen the first snowflakes start to fall, the team can be operational within 30 minutes thanks to an on-call duty desk with a three-shift work schedule. Everybody on the team has a key to all seven vehicles that are strategically positioned on-site, so he or she can immediately get to work. Three of them are Nilfisk-Egholm Park Ranger 2150 multipurpose machines. They are ideally suited for smaller jobs and hard-to-reach areas due to their compact dimensions (only 2.2m long, 1m wide and 1.9m high) and tight (1.5m) turning radius. Car parks, walkways and narrow passages blocked off by tightly spaced pillars are typically locations that play to the Park Rangers’ strengths. “We could of course climb out of the cab and manually remove the posts each time. But that’s a lot easier said than done in the winter because they ice up, plus it would cost us valuable time. With the Park Ranger 2150, we simply scoot in-between the posts without a problem,” says Bernd Müller. Special attention is given to the ‘red zones,’ as Müller employees call them. They include the area directly in front of the emergency and outpatient entrances, which must be 100% accessible at any time of the day or night. In addition to the scooping and sweeping in tight spaces, the multipurpose machine can easily handle larger surfaces. It’s perfectly up to the task of keeping one of the medical center’s main features – the helicopter landing pad – operational at all times. 10,000 square meters under controlWith its restructuring, the importance of Heidelberg University Hospital at the national level increased as well and one of the consequences was the addition of a helipad three years ago. It consists of a landing pad, two helicopter ‘parking spaces,’ access lanes and walkways, and surrounding green areas all together representing about 10,000 square meters (almost 2.5 acres). As a platform for shuttling hospital personnel and patients in and out, from and to all over Germany, it requires the highest levels of safety. For just that reason the Müller Company submitted a maintenance plan for the airfield long before it was officially inaugurated. The company’s proactiveness no doubt played a role in securing the contract. Previously, Steffen Ungerer, the person in charge of grounds maintenance at the University Hospital, and his team would scrupulously follow the helipad maintenance procedures outlined in the specifications list issued by the State of Baden-Württemberg. The top priority is to ensure 24/7 snow and ice removal. The sticking point: Conventional deicing salts may not be used because of their corrosive effect on mechanical equipment. And here, helicopters are particularly sensitive. As experts in their trade, however, Bernd Müller and Steffen Ungerer soon came up with a solution: sodium acetate, a special salt used at airports worldwide. But that still left a major challenge because sodium acetate could not be used in its dry form: the helicopter’s rotors would whirl the granules up and scatter them at every landing and takeoff. Müller and Ungerer thought about it a little more and mounted a special attachment on one of their Park Ranger 2150 machines. This makes it possible to cover the entire area with a liquid version of the salts – and effectively keep it snow and ice free, and thus ensure safe around the clock access while protecting the helicopters. Versatile attachments, universal applicationsAnd just how does this compact multipurpose workhorse manage to take care of this huge area? “The 2150 not only proves incredibly effective at handling the helipad, but also easily keeps all the narrow access lanes ship-shape, too,” adds Steffen Ungerer. Able to take on up to 12,000 square meters per hour with the brush running at 255 rpm, the system’s front cleaning unit is more than up to the task. At the same time, Ungerer lauds the machine’s versatility across the broadest range of applications. “When we have to maintain green spaces, we can quickly exchange attachments, like a front-mounted sweeper unit with the mulching mower deck, or replace that with the weeding brush. No need to buy an additional lawn mower,” he smiles. Another practical aspect: due to its compact dimensions and the agility of its articulated steering, the Park Ranger is easy to park out of the way and out of sight after the job is done. Come wintertime, the host of available accessories opens a world of possibilities for meeting the varied grounds maintenance challenges. The V blade, the salt and sand spreader, the snow sweeper, to name only the main attachments, can be installed in minutes. “We once had to face a major load capacity issue when the upper deck of a car park threatened to collapse under the weight of the snow. The snow sweeper took care of that nicely,” remembers Steffen Ungerer. “Most important, the Park Ranger was well within the safety weight limit of 2.5 metric tons and the maximum clearance of 2 meters for accessing a parking deck in the first place.“ Though it was initially dedicated mainly to winter service, the Müller team discovered another unexpected application for the front-mount sweeper attachment. “Construction sites tend to generate lots of dirt which then gets tracked out on the roadways. All you need is a good downpour and then this rough dirt clings to the asphalt like glue. It’s tough as concrete but still no match for those robust brushes.” With a maximum brush width of 1.22 meters, even narrow lanes are a cinch to clean. Here, the counter-rotating brushes deliver an extra benefit: “Before we had the machine, we’d have to do another pass on the doors and façades because that’s where the dirt ended up after cleaning the ground. Now the job gets done better in less time and with much less hassle.” Growing the fleetJust as the Müller Company nurtures a close, collaborative and enduring relationship with its customers, the company itself is a good customer of L+H Hochstein, a landscaping and commercial cleaning equipment distributor, also located in Heidelberg. Senior Customer Service Manager Eric Hollerbach always makes himself available to Bernd Müller and Steffen Ungerer for advice and active assistance, especially when it comes to the selection of suitable machinery for new orders. That’s how Müller acquired the first Egholm in 2008, a Model 2200. Since then a total of eleven 2150s have joined the equipment fleet; most of them are now parked directly on the customers’ premises. Another project is in the starting blocks: Bernd Müller plans to gradually replace his current sweepers with Nilfisk-Egholm models. “The narrow track is ideal for those small winding cobblestone streets in downtown Heidelberg.” Vanessa Klein, Press-n-Relations | markus.targiel@holzmann-medien.de

Grounds maintenance No job too big, no job too small

Bleiben Sie auf dem aktuellen Stand

Sie wollen schon gehen? Das ist schade.