Schools Have Tough Cleaning Demands. Here Are 3 Reasons Your Custodial Staff Should Be Using A Floor Scrubber For Hard Surfaces
Keeping your school clean can be a challenge — students track in a lot of dirt from outside, and there's a significant amount of foot traffic in the hallways when students change classrooms after the bell rings. Both of these factors combine to create persistently dirty floors.
If your custodial staff is still using a mop and bucket to clean your school's floors, this might not be the best approach — it's difficult for this method to keep up with the cleaning demands in a busy school. Here are three reasons why your custodial staff should be using a floor scrubber to clean your school's hard surfaces instead of a mop and bucket.
1. Improves Safety by Reducing Floor Drying Time
Safety is the number-one reason to use a floor scrubber instead of a mop and bucket to clean your school's hard floors. A mop and bucket leave a significant amount of water on the ground, which can create a slip hazard for students walking the hallways between classes.
Floor scrubbers vacuum up the majority of water used to clean the floor, so floors dry extremely quickly. This helps keep your students safe from slips and falls when they're walking the hallways.
2. Provides a Deeper Clean and Removes Pathogens
If the custodial staff at your school are still using a mop and bucket to clean your hard surfaces, you're not getting the deepest or most hygienic clean possible. The mop and bucket approach to cleaning hard surfaces tends to spread dirty water around the floor, no matter how often your custodial staff is wringing the mop out.
This isn't a good solution for schools — numerous young students in a small area often end up spreading bacteria and viruses, and some of those pathogens will naturally end up on the floor. Students who accidentally drop books or school supplies on the floor can end up coating them in pathogens, increasing the risk that they will get sick. A mop and bucket cleaning strategy doesn't provide for a healthy learning environment.
Floor scrubbers, on the other hand, don't have this problem. They use a small amount of clean water optionally combined with a cleaning solution in order to clean dirt and grime off of your hard surfaces. The water used to clean the floor is immediately vacuumed up into a holding reservoir within the scrubber, keeping the clean water and the dirty water entirely separate.
Since the water is immediately vacuumed up by the scrubber, it is never spread around and it never lingers on the floor. This makes using a floor scrubber in your school a much more hygienic choice compared to using a mop and bucket.
3. Allows More Area to Be Cleaned in the Same Amount of Time
Schools have numerous hard surfaces to clean, such as hallways, gyms, and auditoriums, and using a floor scrubber to clean them will help your custodial staff get the job done quicker. One of the biggest challenges facing school custodial staff is cleaning without disturbing the student population — hallways need to be rapidly cleaned while students are busy in class, while a gym or auditorium needs to be cleaned in the time period after the students go home but before the custodial staff clocks out of work.
Floor scrubbers, especially larger models, are much faster at cleaning hard surfaces compared to using a mop and bucket. This allows your custodial staff to cover more area in the same time period, which helps you maintain your school's hard surfaces.
If you're interested in the advantages of using a floor scrubber to clean your school's hard surfaces instead of using a mop and bucket, contact an equipment vendor. For schools, it's best to purchase a battery-powered model instead of a corded one in order to avoid creating a tripping hazard. Additionally, you can also lease a unit instead of outright purchasing one in order to reduce your initial costs, allowing you to start using a floor scrubber to clean your school immediately — it's the perfect solution for schools when funding is tight.
