October brought interesting challenges in the industrial market for Fail-Safe!
The month of October was a busy one for us!
A new dairy-processing plant is being built south of Amarillo, and Fail-Safe was called in to detail clean some equipment before testing began. The blue “cap” you see on the right is what we had to look for. There were hundreds of them, and the connecting parts (valves, hinges, stems, etc.) all had to be cleaned as well. This was a huge, two-week industrial cleaning job, and we learned quite a bit while we were working on it.
Industrial cleaning is its own brand of work. Everything you know about regular cleaning applies, but there are many additional considerations at play all at once. As an example, for this job, there were places where we absolutely could not simply move dust and dirt around. When performing standard janitorial work in a commercial environment, light dusting can be done with a clean microfiber towel, or simply knocked to the floor with a feather duster since the floor will be swept or vacuumed anyway. On this job, it would have been much easier to just use a blower to knock all the dust to the floor below and sweep it up, but because the plant is a food processing facility, the dust had to be contained to avoid spreading contaminants to sensitive equipment. This meant that we had to vacuum up as much of the dust as possible and then go back over the equipment with small brushes and dry towels to pick up anything that was left behind.
The method of cleaning is just one of the concerns with jobs like this, though.
Safety was our biggest concern, and usually is with industrial-grade cleaning jobs. It’s difficult to tell in the photo above, but this worker is actually about thirty feet above ground, connected to a secure fixture by a full-body harness and a lanyard. We had to balance safety and mobility while we were working so that we could reach all the equipment in need of cleaning while respecting the regulations outlined by the plant supervisors.
What an exciting and challenging opportunity this was for us! We’re now cleaning their offices regularly and are scheduled to resume cleaning inside the plant in December. This has been a great introduction to cleaning in an industrial environment.
