Public bathrooms, lavatories, and locker rooms can all see a lot of activity in the course of a single day. The state of these restrooms also plays a role in how people perceive your professional space. While refilling soap dispensers, emptying waste bins, and refilling paper towel dispensers are relatively easy, cleaning and mopping bathroom floors can be challenging as well as important.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic restrooms that are open, available, and professionally clean have become a top priority around the world. This has commercial property managers striving to implement best practices standards for maintaining all public bathroom surfaces. Especially the floors.
The Signs of an Unclean, Unhealthy Bathroom
There are a few salient signs that your property’s bathrooms aren’t properly cleaned and sanitized. This starts with unpleasant odors which indicate biological activity in the restroom, typically caused by a buildup of bacteria. Of course, the stronger these odors are, the more bacteria are thriving in your bathrooms. The most common place you will find these deposits is on floors, on corners, and near toilets or urinals.
Anytime a toilet is flushed, a fine mist of fecal material, urine, and bacterial deposits fly into the air. As time passes, these particles slowly start to settle on surfaces throughout the bathroom. Since the floor has the most surface area, the bacterial and biological concentration tends to be the highest near the toilets. When these areas aren’t mopped, the bacterial presence can spread throughout the bathroom. In a severe situation, the bacteria can even travel far beyond the bathroom on the shoes of everyone who visits your restrooms!
Bathroom Maintenance & Protecting Health in Your Building
While a healthy individual with a strong immune system will typically have no problem fighting off a disease-causing organism from a restroom, people with weakened immune systems might not be so lucky.
This includes:
- Babies
- Children
- Seniors
- Individuals with autoimmune conditions
People who are being treated with medications that suppress the immune system
At Building Services we think of our professional cleaners as guardians of public cleanliness. Our highly trained technicians go beyond the call of duty, using industry best practices for mopping floors and cleaning bathrooms. Our goal is to effectively rid restrooms of pathogens, bacteria, and odor-causing organisms. This ensures that people who visit your restrooms will not spread contaminants throughout the rest of the building.
Using The Right Tools for The Job
The inconvenient truth is that traditional mops simply aren’t built to remove. They end up spreading bacterial deposits and ultimately cross-contaminating the bathroom floors. At the same time, the absorbent mop head also provides a fertile damp environment for bacteria to live and breed in between mopping sessions.
A damp mop head can become home to a bacterial population, reintroducing it to the bathroom. If you are using the same mop to clean bathroom floors and other hard floors in your building, those same bathroom bacteria can escape further and further into your facility.
This means frequently changing mop heads, and going above and beyond the call of duty to sanitize the mop head. Not to mention frequently need to replace mop water followed by carefully sanitizing the mop bucket.
Custodial Staff Cleaning Bathrooms
For most cleaning professionals to be truly effective they need to spray a professional-grade cleaning solution and allow it to linger while it kills the bacteria. Then they use a clean, dry side of a cleaning cloth every time they wipe down a surface. This can be a lot of work, especially when you consider the extra time cleaning professionals need to spend cleaning the rest of the facility.
This can be understandably prohibitive for your in-house custodial staff, which is one of the reasons why so many building janitors stick stubbornly to arguably ineffective cloth mops. Yet the bacterial liability issues and odors still remain. That’s why a lot of commercial property managers are transitioning their bathroom cleaning and floor sanitizing needs to professional cleaning companies like Building Services Inc.
Innovation in Bathroom Floor Cleaning Best Practices
At Building Services we always embrace innovation to maximize our cleaning and sanitizing practices. This includes our innovative approach to cleaning bathroom floors.
We start with a specially formulated “No-Touch Cleaning” which is sprayed using a measured low-pressure setting. The mixture of the solution maximizes effectiveness while minimizing chemical waste. Our technicians then rinse the area with high pressure. This water rinse effectively blasts stubborn bacterial deposits out of grout lines, and cracks, and trapped in crevices.
We then use a state-of-the-art wet-dry vacuum to extract the water and solution with the loosened contaminants from the floor. The bathroom floors are left clean, dry, and safe to immediately return to service. It also prevents bacterial deposits from being tracked into the rest of your building.
Cleaning The Rest of the Bathroom
Cleaning the floors is just one important part of getting your building’s bathrooms safely sanitized. We then use a special no-touch cleaning system that combines our indoor pressure washer technique with the same powerful wet vacuum.
This has shown to be many times more effective at removing bacteria from grout lines than traditional methods. At the same time, these No-Touch Cleaning techniques also help to reduce the time it takes to clean a single restroom fixture from 3 minutes down to 1 minute.
We then finish up the bathroom cleaning process by cleaning all the fixtures and faucets, as well as meticulously wiping down the mirrors. Then all trash receptacles are emptied, taking care not to cross-contaminate the new bag liner or allow bacterial deposits to escape the bathroom.
We finish up the bathroom cleaning process by refilling all soap dispensers and hand sanitizer dispensers. Paper towel dispensers will be checked and refilled. Any air hand driers will also be wiped down and sanitized along with any other high-touch surfaces. We complete the process by performing one last spot check to make sure everything is meticulously up to our high standards.
