Restroom Cleaning Machine: Madison County Schools Enhance Cleanliness

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As Dan Evans, the Director of Operations & Auxiliary Services for the Madison County School District, a 26-school, 20,000-student K-12 district headquartered in Huntsville, AL, surveyed the state of the district’s hundreds of restroom facilities, he began wondering, “How clean is clean?”

“When we’d do an evaluation of our facilities, we’d look at the restrooms and wonder, ‘Are these areas as clean as they can be?’” Evans explained. “On the surface, they looked like they were, but was our current cleaning regimen providing a cleanliness level that we could be completely satisfied with?”

With the 2008-09 school year approaching, Evans contacted Morty Banks, president of Huntsville-based Banks Industries, a cleaning equipment and accessories distributor, for some possible solutions. Banks recommended a mobile cleaning unit that eliminates the need for old-style mop-and-bucket cleaning techniques that are not only inefficient, but less-than-motivating for cleaning personnel. Demoing the equipment for Madison County principals, administrators and custodial staff, Banks visually showed that the cleaning unit could do a better, more efficient cleaning job than the previous methods. The bottom line: Madison County personnel were so impressed that 20 of Madison County’s schools began the new school year with a new cleaning regimen that includes automated touchless cleaning.

The solution for Madison County is a cleaning tool that not only makes its school facilities more sanitary, but does it in a fast, efficient, economical and environmentally friendly way. Hydro Systems Co., the leading independent manufacturer of proportioning, dosing and dispensing systems for concentrated chemicals, and an industry leader in automatic/touch-free cleaning systems for daily cleaning applications, has created the ICS 8900—which is marketed as the Transport Cleaning System, or TCS, in the Madison County area—as a mobile integrated cleaning system and the best-in-class solution for touch-free restroom and locker-room cleaning.

“It’s a systematic way to ensure that something is being done every day,” said Evans, “We have a responsibility to our students, parents and teachers to provide the most appropriate learning environment that we can. Before we got these machines, the custodians had their individual ways of cleaning the restrooms, but we had no way to ensure that the solutions or amount of chemicals they were using were correct. With the cleaning system it’s easy to say, ‘This is the way to do it, start at the ceiling and work your way down to the floor.’”

The ICS 8900 is a battery-powered, self-contained portable-cleaning system that uses correctly dosed cleaning chemicals that are applied by spray nozzle using low-flow/low-pressure technology, enabling the chemicals to do the cleaning while protecting fixtures and grout from water damage and eliminating the spray-back of bacteria-contaminated water. In addition, the ICS 8900 cleans faster. In fact, ISSA 447 Cleaning Times show that the use of touchless cleaning technology can reduce fixture-cleaning time by as much as 67 percent. The ICS 8900 is also kind to the environment, with 50-percent less water and chemicals used when compared with many other automated cleaning systems—which will become increasingly important as more and more states mandate that their schools employ “green” cleaning techniques. The ICS 8900 operates on a rechargeable, maintenance-free 12V lead-acid battery, and the compact design and simple operation of the ICS 8900 eliminates complicated and time-consuming setup and breakdown.