The encounter got Wynia thinking that perhaps he should consider similar equipment for the hospital. After all, his 340-acre campus has more than 2 miles of concrete tunnels used for transporting patients between buildings.
When Wynia finally purchased the hospital’s first riding floor scrubber machine, he wasn’t disappointed.
“We use it to clean the tunnels every week,” Wynia says. “It cut our time significantly. We used to do it with a 20-year-old ‘pusher’ or walk behind floor scrubber and it took us three or four days. Now we can do it all in a few hours.”
Driven by cleaning managers’ requests for technology that allows them to do more with less, manufacturers continue to fine-tune ride-on floor scrubbers and floor care equipment. Today, the industry boasts ride-on sweepers, vacuums, scrubbers and polishers. The latest? Ride-on burnishers.
While this automated equipment is a smart solution for many facilities, it may not be a good fit for every building. Housekeeping managers must consider many factors, including the size and storage space of their facility, their budget and cleaning needs, and their employees’ skills and training requirements.
Size wise
Ride-on equipment is most logical for large, open spaces. Cleaning Temple University’s field house, which houses four basketball courts, with a traditional walk-behind machine would be tedious and time-consuming. Instead, the cleaning crew uses a riding sweeper-scrubber combination to make the textured rubber floor shine.
“Having a person walk behind and push a machine would be a lot of labor,” says Virginia Arnsberger, director of housekeeping. “With this machine, within an hour or hour and a half, you can scrub and vacuum the whole floor.”
Custodians at Washoe County (Nev.) School District’s two new high schools use ride-on scrubbing machines for the schools’ wide hallways. Although the areas could be mopped by hand, the automated machines cut cleaning time in half, says Harry Kirkbride, the district’s housekeeping field supervisor.
Ride-on machines don’t make the grade in smaller spaces; neither Arnsberger nor Kirkbride use them in their classrooms. Stephanie Maxwell, facility coordinator at Samaritan Village Senior Community in Hughson, Calif., agrees.
“We’ve looked into them, but we can’t justify it,” she says. “Our residents’ rooms are about 800 square feet. We don’t even have the room to store something like that.”
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