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Home » Morrison Minutes » Reduce Labor Cost with Industrial Cleaning Equipment

Reduce Labor Cost with Industrial Cleaning Equipment

May 01 2023 Sweeper/Scrubbers 3 Min. Read


When you look at the image above, do you get the feeling "cleaning is in progress"? Not so much, right? And, in a large plant, warehouse, or retail space, manual methods of cleaning are not just ineffective--they are inefficient!  

When it comes to maintaining floors, labor costs represent about 90 percent of the total cost. While the upfront cost of industrial cleaning machines is much higher than buying mops and brooms, they typically pay for themselves in less than 3 months. How? Primarily through reduced labor costs.

Let’s look at Employee A who, on a good day, can clean 4,000-5,000 square feet in an hour with a mop and bucket. Compare him/her to our smallest walk-behind auto-scrubber that cleans—and dries—the same floor a little over 3X faster!

And the more square footage of floorspace you have to manage, the more sense auto sweepers and auto scrubbers make for your facility. Rider-scrubbers scrub and dry over 100,000 square feet per hour, reducing labor costs by 20 hours or more. And, in extra-large areas, A Combination Sweeper/Scrubber, like the PowerBoss Nautilus sweeps, scrubs and dries floors at more than 160,000 square feet per hour! Here are some other floor cleaning equipment productivity stats from Advance:

Warehouse Floor Cleaning Equipment Productivity*

Cleaning method Equipment Square feet per hour (est.)
Push broom 24” broom 3,896
36” broom 5,556
Dust mop 36" mop 12,500
Walk-behind sweeper 28” sweeper 17,248
36” sweeper 25,452
Ride-on sweeper 30” sweeper 32,741
46” sweeper 63,466
60” sweeper 82,782
77” sweeper 106,237
Wet mop 24-oz mop 5,000
Walk-behind scrubber 20” scrubber 9,740
28” scrubber 13,009
38” scrubber 17,655
Ride-on scrubber 48” scrubber 44,669
62” scrubber 57,697

* Source: Nilfisk-Advance

Clean Better with Industrial Cleaning Equipment

Let’s be real. Mops and brooms are definitely not the most efficient way to keep a building clean. They just cannot clean floors. Brooms stir up more dust than they remove, and mops smear germy, dirty, nasty water all over your floors. Compare that to auto-scrubbers and sweepers—

Automatic scrubbers use 100 percent clean water. Period. The dirty wastewater never touches the floor.

Automatic sweepers leave very little if any dust and debris behind. It all goes in the hopper through a filtration system, keeping your floors, the products on your shelves, the machines in your plant, and the air you breathe—clean.

And I keep mentioning drying the floors because mops don’t provide the advantage of a scrubber machine with squeegees and a vacuum system that leave floors clean and dry. Mops leave floors wet and wet floors are a huge safety concern.

Free consultations and demos

At Morrison Industrial Equipment, we offer free consultations to help you determine the best floor cleaning equipment for your operation. Our team is eager to learn about your business and recommend the machine(s) that will fit your needs.

To ensure you make an informed decision, we can also provide a free demo at your location. During the demo, we'll explain all the features and benefits of different machines, and you can invite as many employees as you'd like to attend. Depending on whether we're demoing a walk-behind or ride-on machine, the demo takes 30 minutes to an hour.

Don't hesitate to contact us for a free consultation and demo. We're committed to helping you find the right floor cleaning equipment for your business.

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