Keeping Spaces Tidy with Industrial Sweepers and Scrubbers
In large commercial settings, floor cleanliness too often goes unappreciated until soils accumulate to the point that safety and environmental quality are at tangible risk. Even more importantly, different business types quantify risks in many different ways – some businesses focus on slip hazards presented by a buildup of fine dirt, others are more concerned with bacterial risks tracked in on employee’s shoes, and so on.
Thankfully, there is an entire cleaning equipment market that stands ready to help businesses combat these many diverse hazards, most notably by customizing industrial floor sweeping and scrubbing equipment to tackle any given application.
Floor sweepers and scrubbers sound very similar and have a fair bit of overlap in their capabilities but should be viewed independently as they serve different purposes overall.
Industrial Floor Sweepers
Floor sweeping equipment is designed to lightly brush and vacuum up free-moving dust and debris. Sweepers predominantly serve dry or mildly damp applications that do not require aggressive force to free and capture floor soils. From an operational perspective, businesses use sweepers to help keep general dust and particulate levels down in otherwise relatively clean environments such as material handling warehouses and big-box retail stores.
Industrial Floor Scrubbers
Floor scrubbing equipment is designed for tough applications where forceful mechanical and chemical cleaning is needed to remove all types of dry, wet, and caked-on soils. Floor scrubbers press their scrubbing heads down onto floor surfaces for high-contact cleaning action. In addition, scrubbers often combine multiple other cleaning functions such as sweeping, chemical dosing, and vacuuming into one packaged machine.
Operationally, businesses utilize scrubbers to provide a higher level of cleaning than sweeping alone where soils directly present safety, contamination, human health, pathogenic, and quality hazards.
The Most Frequently Selected Sweeper/Scrubber Customization Options
While customization options certainly vary between manufacturers, here are the most common options that we routinely specify with our customers:
Sweep Technology
Most industrial floor sweepers are designed around either linear brushes or drum brushes, with many machines having customization options available to mix-and-match styles. The most common option selected in this category is adding side sweep brushes onto a linear sweeper, expanding its coverage area and helping to get into tight corners.
Sweep Brush Design
Sweeper brushes apply to both sweepers and scrubbers, and offer multiple customization options including:
- Brush Rows – single bristle rows are best for fine dusts, whereas multi-row brushes are better for large debris and particulates.
- Brush Diameter – changing the diameter of side or overhung brushes can help reach around obstacles (such as equipment legs) and fit into difficult spaces.
- Brush Reinforcement – selecting brushes with larger bristle sizes and metallic reinforced cores provides longer brush life and reduced wear.
- Brush Angle – changing a brush’s bristle angle directly influences how aggressive (when more upright) or gentle (when more angled) the brush is on the floor.
- Brush Materials – most brushes are made of polypropylene materials which provide a great balance of lifespan to cost, with alternatives available including nylon (for long-life, dry only cleaning), natural fibers (for environmentally conscious, medium-life, dry only cleaning), and metallic wire (for rough, abrasive dry or wet sweeping).
- Brush Coating – brushes can be customized with special coatings applied to their surfaces. Coatings are selected for three reasons: providing a wear surface that lengthens the brush’s lifespan; providing quality benefits such as with an antimicrobial coating; or providing more aggressive scrubbing action by adding a grit-laden coating.
Scrub Technology
Most floor scrubbers are designed around one of these scrubbing technologies alone, however many models offer upgrades between scrubbing methods or the addition of secondary scrubbing heads of these designs:
- Disc Scrubbing – disc scrubbers utilize one or two disc heads with heavy duty brushes to clean hard, irregular surfaces. Disc scrubbers are great general cleaning units that offer the highest cleaning speeds and path widths, but offer the least aggressive cleaning force of these three options.
- Cylindrical Scrubbing – these scrubbers can scrub and sweep at once using a single combination scrub head. This compound scrubbing mechanism provides a median balance of cleaning speed and cleaning force.
- Orbital Scrubbing – orbit scrubbers use advanced scrub pads that move in randomized linear cleaning patterns to remove the toughest soils with the lowest amounts of chemicals and water. With orbital scrubbing, high cleaning force is traded for reduced travel speeds.
Scrub Speed & Pressure
Many scrubbers offer multiple options for scrub speeds and pressures in the same model. Higher scrub pressures provide increased performance in removing difficult floor soils but at the cost of travel speed. Customizing scrubber cleaning pressures and speeds is arguably the most important option for buyers to consider, as these decisions directly tie to the scrubber’s productivity (as in, how much floor area can be cleaned in a given amount of time).
Vacuum System
For industrial floor sweepers and scrubbers, customizable vacuum options include multiple vacuum motor horsepowers, variable speed vacuum control, wet/dry vacuum configurations, and HEPA filtration for the vacuum’s exhaust air (which helps control indoor environmental quality).
Battery Spec
Electric battery specifications are a popular customization point that floor cleaner buyers should consider, including battery voltage, amp hour capacity, and core technology (IE lithium-ion).
Vessel Capacities
To help increase the amount of floor area that floor cleaners can clean at one time, many base models offer expanded vessel options for their debris bins, vacuum hoppers, chemical tanks, and water tanks.
Operator Control Package & Interface
As with most industrial equipment today, floor cleaning equipment can be customized with various tiers of operator interfaces and controls. For most OEMs, base models include tactile controls and a few warning LEDs only. Advanced options include touchscreen controls, haptic feedback, full digital HUDs (heads-up displays), and integrated intelligent control platforms that provide a host of analytical and performance data.
Advanced Application Examples Using Customized Industrial Floor Sweepers & Scrubbers
To put some of the above options into context, here are a few application examples where customized industrial floor cleaning equipment shines:
Large Material Handling Warehouse Dust Control
Material handling businesses (and manufacturing sector businesses at large) continue to struggle with staffing challenges, which has driven increasing interest in autonomous wide-format floor sweepers. In these applications, material handling and distribution centers customize floor sweepers with dual, maximum diameter disc sweeping mechanisms, high-power vacuums, and integrated autonomous control packages. This configuration targets the continuous, fastest reasonable sweeping speed of loose, free dust, without the need for a human operator.
Food Processing Floor Sanitation
Food manufacturing environments can be some of the most severe spaces where floor cleaning equipment is employed, experiencing extreme temperatures, high chemical concentrations, pathogen-killing sterilization, and often around-the-clock operation.
Industrial floor cleaners that are best suited to these environments are usually customized with upgraded materials (such as stainless-steel trim and food-grade polypropylene brushes), expanded tank sizes, wet-vac systems, and secondary disinfectant sprayers.
Retail & Grocery Store Floor Cleaning
Consumer retail spaces have yet another unique set of challenges that customized floor cleaners can readily address, this time in terms of gentle operation and customer safety. Floor cleaners for these applications are often customized with non-marking tires and brush materials (to protect floor finishes), low noise insulated housings, scraper vacuum bars (to directly suck up spilled fluids), and MERV 17+ HEPA filters (to absolutely contain vacuum dust from becoming airborne).
We hope that this discussion on material handling techniques and technologies proves useful to your manufacturing, construction, and distribution interests. Atlantic Forklift Services is your premiere material handling equipment resource, serving customers in the North and South Carolinas with professional equipment sales, rentals, service, repair, parts, training, and solution consulting. As a Platinum award-winning dealership, Atlantic partners with world-class equipment manufacturers including.
To learn more, please contact us by phone at (866) 243-0991, by email at info@atlanticforkliftservices.com, or on the web at https://www.atlanticforkliftservices.com/.
Last edited 4 minutes ago