Tornado Industries offers tips for offering budgeted floor care in schools

WEST CHICAGO, IL — Tornado Industries has created a “School District Floor Care Survival Guide” for commercial cleaners doing work in schools during budgeted times, according to a release.

Many schools must operate on a tight budget and, because of this, often choose to cut costs by cutting floor care.

Doug Berjer of Tornado Industries, manufacturer of cylindrical brush floor machines and other floor care equipment, suggest cleaners in these schools collect data and offer schools an alternate, “more with less” course of cleaning action.

Berjer suggests cleaners collect the following data:

1. Specific floor areas to be cleaned and the size of each.
2. Equipment currently used for floor care — everything from mops and buckets to scrubbers and burnishers.
3. Breakdown of time required to complete floor care tasks multiplied by the number of workers times their hourly wages.

“Now it’s just a matter of doing the math,” Berjer says in the release. He points to a study conducted by the American Institute for Cleaning Sciences, which compared two schools with comparable size and cleaning schedule.

The study found:

• School "A" uses mops and buckets costing about $50 per set to clean their floors. Using this equipment, it takes two custodians working about 4.5 hours each to complete the floor work, costing the school system $26,000 per year.
• School "B" uses one cylindrical brush floor machine with an 18-inch cleaning path that costs about $3,500. With this machine, one worker can clean approximately 8,500 square feet per hour, taking 3.5 hours to clean 30,000 square feet of floor space. Labor costs amount to about $11,000 per year.

Berjer recommends commercial cleaners offer schools a mathematical breakdown like this to encourage them to see “true savings.”

For the full release, please click here.