Keeping It Clean: Maintaining and Preserving Your Floor

No matter where you look nowadays, cleanliness is a must. From healthcare, food service, and retail to business and industry, workplaces are now going to extremes to ensure their employees, customers, and visitors keep from spreading bacteria and viruses to others.

High foot-traffic areas like hospitals, malls, airports, and business centers are often a challenge to keep clean due to the number of people passing through each day. Receiving the greatest amount of wear and tear are the floors. Dirt, dust from construction, mold, bacteria, and even viruses force facility managers into a constant battle for cleanliness.

But, with the right equipment and a thorough cleaning schedule, you’ll not only keep your floors clean but also preserve and maintain them for years to come.

Two key pieces of floor cleaning equipment are sweepers and scrubbers.

Floor maintenance should always begin with a clean sweep. Unlike brooms, an industrial sweeper, whether a walk-behind or ride-on, will effectively and efficiently sweep away any debris or dust that has accumulated on your floors.

Featuring multiple brooms instead of just one, cleaning widths of up to 62-inches, hopper capacities up to 14 cubic feet, and travel speeds up to 8 mph, industrial floor sweepers can significantly reduce cleaning times and increase efficiency by almost 100 percent compared to manual sweeping.

Running on liquid propane or battery, these sweepers have run times well over three hours, making them ideal for indoor or outdoor use at a wide range of facilities. Sweepers, like the ones available at Herc Rentals, also offer exceptional dust control, capable of capturing particles as small as 3 microns at 95 percent efficiency.

Once the floor is swept free of dirt and dust, it’s time for the deep cleaning. Unlike mops and floor cleaning solutions that take a great deal of effort and require time to dry before a section of floor is walkable again, walk-behind and ride-on scrubbers take minimal effort with most models cleaning and drying in one pass.

Scrubbers use water, a cleaning solution, and a series of brushes and vacuums. As it passes over a floor, the water and cleaning solution are sprayed on the floor while the brushes scrub the surface. Dirty water and debris are then sucked up by the vacuum and stored in a hopper for emptying later.

Highly efficient, these propane or battery-powered scrubbers feature cleaning widths up to 40-inches, travel up to 8 mph, and can clean up to 88,000 square feet of floor before having to empty the machine’s recovery tank.

WHAT SWEEPER AND SCRUBBER IS RIGHT FOR YOU?

Some things to consider when selecting a sweeper and scrubber include facility floor space: the amount of foot traffic your business receives as well as the local climate.

While the size of your facility’s floor space should help you decide whether you need a narrow or wide cleaning width, you should also be cognizant of foot-traffic and where dust, dirt, and more tend to accumulate. In northern climates where snow and ice are around for large portions of the year, dirt and grime are often transferred indoors. As the snow and ice melt inside, the dirt and grime get left behind, making sweeping and scrubbing floors a more frequent chore.

Remember, while smaller machines may be less costly to rent, what you save will likely be lost in labor expenses if you’re using a smaller machine on a large floor.

If you’re still not sure what machines you’ll need for your facility, renting a sweeper and scrubber may be the best way to go. By working with a company like Herc Rentals, the gear you need can be delivered and retrieved directly from your facility, saving you time from shopping around and taking you away from the job at hand. Additionally, Herc Rentals has industrial floor cleaning experts on hand 24/7 to help your operators with instructions, tips and more.

To rent these and other flooring, concrete, and masonry equipment, visit one of Herc Rentals’ 275+ locations or one of our Floor Care Solution locations, which are located in Charlotte, NC; Atlanta, GA; Fairfield, NJ; and Benicia, CA, with more to come. Herc Rentals has the capability to relocate equipment from these locations to its local branches in just a few hours to rapidly meet customer needs.

For more flooring solutions and other equipment, check out the company’s Rental Solutions Guide.

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