One of the most important components of any effective janitorial team is preventive maintenance. Yes, janitorial teams are tasked with performing daily cleaning, such as washing floors, disinfecting common areas, emptying trash receptacles, cleaning restrooms, and more. However, at the same time, efficient janitorial teams should also be performing preventive maintenance.
Preventive maintenance is one of the many areas where LACOSTA shines above competitors who offer janitorial services. Often, janitorial services will only provide the typical daily cleaning procedures for their clients, neglecting preventive maintenance. This can be incredibly detrimental in the long-run, as preventive maintenance ensures that the workplace continues to operate effectively and efficiently over the long-haul.
In this post, we will cover some of the preventive maintenance procedures our trained janitorial teams provide our various clients with, as well as how they could benefit your business’ operations.
What Exactly Falls Under the Purview of Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance is essentially anything that involves functional checks and servicing of equipment, materials, machinery, and anything else that plays a role in the operations of a worksite. Unlike daily cleaning procedures, preventive maintenance is not done every day, and it is typically performed to maintain equipment or functional infrastructure.
Examples of preventive maintenance, which we will cover in more depth below, include, but are not limited to stripping and waxing floors, carpet extraction, and vent cleaning.
Carpet Cleaning
Carpet cleaning is one of the most important aspects of preventive maintenance. The reason for this is that carpet is very unforgiving. Once it is soiled or starts to show wear, it is almost impossible to reverse the process, even with today’s special carpets that offer stain resistance and other benefits.
In light of this, carpet needs to be cleaned on a regular basis, typically every six months. Obviously, the frequency with which carpet needs to be cleaned depends on how much traffic the area receives, as well as what kinds of traffic (i.e. in Chicago carpet typically becomes soiled with salt and other harsh contaminants during the winter, something that isn’t a problem in Los Angeles).
Proper carpet cleaning can add years of life to carpets, saving your business money as well as minimizing the downtime that takes place whenever carpets have to be replaced.
Vent Cleaning
Vent cleaning is another incredibly important aspect of preventive maintenance. Vents circulate air throughout worksites and facilities, impacting what employees are breathing in.
Cleaning vents removes dust mites, which can help employees who suffer from allergies and asthma, creating a healthier and cleaner working environment. Additionally, cleaning vents can prevent moisture from building up within your air ducts and HVAC system, which can lead to the growth of mold. Once mold grows, mold spores can be released into the air, severely impacting the indoor air quality (IAQ) of your facility. Mold can also be extremely detrimental to the health of your employees.
Further, if mold does grow, it is important to catch it right away. If you allow your ventilation system to become infested with mold, it can be an absolute nightmare, as well as an extremely expensive process, to get rid of it.
Lastly, cleaning vents can increase the overall efficiency of your facilities HVAC system. Not only does this cut down on the cost of the HVAC system, but it can help extend the life of the HVAC system and reduce the maintenance costs associated with it. Fixing serious problems and/or replacing an HVAC system is, needless to say, extremely expensive. It is best to nip these problems in the bud.
Stripping and Waxing Floors
Stripping and waxing floors maintains the quality of your floors and extends their life. Stripping and waxing refers to the process of removing the wax layer from a floor and then reapplying a fresh coat of wax.
Proper maintenance of floors reduces the risks of having to make costly repairs or replace the floors in the future. Can you imagine the downtime a facility would have to endure if you have to replace large areas of flooring in, for example, a factory?
In particular, waxing floors protects them from scratches, spills, and other damage. At the same time, stripping and waxing floors gives them that incredible shine that is indicative of a clean, efficient, productive, and properly maintained worksite!
A Customized Approach
The aforementioned examples only scratch the surface in terms of the many different types of preventive maintenance. Obviously, the required preventive maintenance varies from worksite to worksite. For example, while a large office complex will need carpet cleaning, a large factory will most likely not since they typically don’t have carpet on their floors.
As part of our services, we evaluate each individual business to assess their needs. This allows us to tailor our services to satisfy the requirements of each and every one of our clients. This adaptability is what enables us to operate in a vast array of industries. We work closely with each of our clients, and we are always happy to adjust our services as we identify the needs of our clients’ worksites.
Overview
Preventive maintenance is one of the most important, but also one of the most overlooked, aspects of janitorial services. Without preventive maintenance, it is impossible to maintain high-standards, performance, and efficiency in a worksite over the long-run.
In many ways, it is similar to taking your car in for a tune-up and an oil change. Doing so allows problems to be identified early on, as well as enabling small adjustments to be made so that small issues don’t turn into big ones in the long-run. The same concept applies to worksite preventive maintenance.
Now, it is not uncommon to hear that all these preventive maintenance tasks cost extra money. Indeed, it does cost more money to do these things in the short-run than if you just left them alone, however, in the long-run the savings are exponential. Just as tuning a car’s engine prevents you from having to replace it, stripping and waxing floors prevents you from having to replace them, and the preventative costs are a lot less than fully replacing them. A small investment in preventive maintenance today can lead to incredible savings down the road!
As always, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. If you are interested in learning more about how our janitorial services, including our approach to preventive maintenance, could benefit your business, we would be happy to discuss how our services would apply to your business specifically.