Floor Care: Multi-surface Floor Machine Helps Solve University's Toughest Cleaning Challenge

Company Website

Eastern Washington University (EWU) is a 125-year-old public institution located about 17 miles from Spokane, Wash., in the midst of beautiful mountains, lakes and forests. As the state’s fastest-growing public institution, EWU boasts more than 10,000 students and many cleaning challenges. When asked to describe his toughest cleaning challenge, the custodial manager at EWU, Ray Godin, says: “By far, our toughest cleaning problem is maintaining all of our carpets and a wide variety of hard-surface floors.” With approximately two million square feet of hard and soft flooring to maintain on a daily basis, Godin was searching for an alternative to using separate pieces of equipment for cleaning each type of flooring. He recently found a one-machine solution in the Advance Adphibian™ extractor/scrubber that cleans both soft- and hard-surface floors.

“Because we’re a university, we have many different types of flooring – brick, concrete, terrazzo, tile and a lot of long carpeted hallways,” says Godin. “In the past we had to use four different machines to clean these varied surfaces – from a small spotter to a deep extractor to a large auto scrubber or truck-mounted carpet cleaner. Now, the Advance Adphibian is taking the place of all these machines. We use it as a spotter and a deep carpet extractor – or with the touch of a button and a change of hose, it becomes a hard-surface floor scrubber. We estimate the Adphibian is saving us up to two hours of labor per shift while delivering better performance.”

School Sees Better Cleaning Performance
Along with time and labor savings has come better overall performance. Eastern Washington University previously used large, truck-mounted carpet extractors for a majority of its carpet cleaning. Now, with the time saved from using smaller equipment and fewer machines, the university is not only able to clean more frequently, but it has actually seen better results, too. “We’re able to keep up with the cleaning more frequently because of the ease,” Godin says, “but I couldn’t believe how deep the cleaning is with the Adphibian. It’s actually increased our cleanliness standard.”

More frequent cleaning has also contributed to the university maintaining cleaner floors. The versatility and maneuverability of Adphibian has eliminated the need for different machines and additional set-up time, allowing Godin’s staff to clean more frequently. By keeping floors cleaner, there is less dirt and grit to abrade the finish under foot traffic. “With the brush element in the Adphibian, it works great for tile or hard-surface floors and actually maintains the wax longer so we don’t have to recoat as often. It does a great job of lifting the dirt and grime out of the grout lines instead of just going over them and letting the dirty water settle into them.”

More Frequent Cleaning Extends Surface Life
In addition to time savings, Godin says they have reduced the university’s costs of stripping and resurfacing to extend the life of floor coatings by six months. “Our normal schedule was about two times a year. By cleaning regularly with Adphibian, we now only need to strip and resurface floors once a year or every year and a half,” he says. More frequent cleaning extends the life of carpeting too, he says. “The truck-mounted carpet extractor we previously used cost $40,000, was not able to be used everywhere and took about an hour to set up each time. With the amount of carpeting we have throughout the campus, it was very time-consuming and we couldn’t clean carpets as often.”

The university library contained a combination of carpeting and hard-surface flooring that was impossible to access with the truck-mounted carpet extractor. “We now use the Adphibian in the library for carpet extraction and hard-surface floor cleaning. It’s actually cleaner now than in the past, and we’ve extended the surface life with more frequent cleaning,” Godin says.

Student Traffic Requires Quick Drying
The Adphibian has a dual-cleaning mode that lets Godin’s staff choose between a low-moisture or a restoration mode. For daily carpet cleaning, the Adphibian uses an indirect spray that leaves carpets clean and dry in less than 30 minutes. Godin says this is important when cleaning busy corridors that have constant student traffic. Adphibian’s pre-spray mode allows him to quickly deep-treat heavily soiled areas by automatically applying and agitating a pre-spray detergent on the carpeted surfaces. Then, the area can be extracted with clean water.

 Another advantage cited is the machine’s compact size. Godin says that unlike their previous equipment, the Adphibian was able to fit through the doorways to the university’s racquetball and basketball courts. “We’re now able to take the machine in there to do prep work or even a deep scrub on wood floors. It’s been very good for that.” Small size and fewer pieces of equipment are also helping with storage issues. As the university’s student population has grown, the amount of storage space for cleaning equipment has shrunk.

Keeping a vibrant and crowded university campus clean is a big job, yet custodial managers are finding that multi-surface floor-cleaning equipment like the Advance Adphibian is not only making their jobs easier and more efficient, but also producing better cleaning results.