Maintaining Your Floor Cleaning Equipment

Your cleaning operation has likely made significant investment in various types of floor cleaning equipment (vacuums, scrubbers, buffers, etc.). Those machines are the mechanical workhorses for your provision of floor maintenance services for your clients. When properly maintained, those machines can provide years of reliable service. Conversely, improper use and poor maintenance can result in high repair costs and reduced life-spans. Poorly maintained equipment also inhibits that equipment’s ability to perform at its peak level. Your cleaning operation can maximize its equipment investment by following a few basic principles of floor cleaning machine maintenance.

Equipment Maintenance Program

Having a documented Equipment Maintenance Program will add structure to your attempts to properly maintain your floor cleaning machines. Your program should clearly designate those individuals within your operation that will be responsible for general oversight of the program as well as those that will be supervising day to day compliance. Your Equipment Maintenance Program should be a living entity that grows along with your cleaning operation.

Maintenance Schedule

This is the critical element of any Equipment Maintenance Program. Following a detailed maintenance schedule will provide you with a controlled and repeatable process that will help ensure that your floor cleaning equipment is consistently operating at its optimum efficiency. Most floor cleaning equipment will come with recommended maintenance schedules. Those recommendations can be taken as the baseline for the creation of a maintenance schedule for your equipment.

There are several software tools available today that allow for user-friendly development of equipment maintenance schedules that can be customized to the specific needs of the cleaning operation. An effective maintenance schedule will include provisions for:

• Routine Cleaning:  Failure to properly clean floor cleaning equipment is a leading cause of machine failure. Machine stress and over-heating are just a couple of the symptoms associated with improper cleaning. Lack of proper cleaning also leads to poor cleaning performance. Use of “dirty” equipment will result in floors that are not truly clean.
• Periodic Inspections:  The maintenance schedule should specify periodic inspections of the floor cleaning equipment. The schedule should call for different levels of inspection (daily, weekly, monthly) in which each level will contain specific inspection steps. Mechanical problems that are detected early can be remedied in time to avoid a complete break-down of the machine.
• Record Keeping:  The maintenance schedule should include a mechanism for the logging of all maintenance activities. The log should be periodically audited to validate that all maintenance schedule requirements have been met.

Training

Proper training is crucial. Those individuals within your cleaning staff that will be responsible for maintenance of your floor cleaning equipment must be adequately trained on all elements contained within your maintenance schedule. The training should convey the importance of proper equipment maintenance in a way that instills a sense of “ownership” among those staff members.

Floor cleaning machine maintenance….when done properly it will extend the life of your equipment and allow you to provide superior service to your clients.

Do you properly maintain your floor cleaning equipment? Share your thoughts in the section for comments below.

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