Short, specific answers to the questions commercial buyers ask us before they sign anything, written by the people who do the work.
No listicles and no filler. Each piece here covers one thing a facility manager or general contractor has to decide, and says what we actually do rather than what a sales brochure would say.
Lead story
By Tommy Bachus · Director of Operations 2 min read
The carpet was clean when the machine left and gray again by the next morning. There are five causes, they look almost identical, and one of them is not dirt at all.
Carpet holds far more soil below the surface than on it. When a wet method puts moisture into the pile, that moisture travels down to the backing, dissolves what is sitting there, and then carries it back up as the carpet dries, depositing it at the tips of the fibre, which is exactly where you look.
The tell is timing. If the marks were gone when the crew left and came back as the carpet dried, that is wicking and not a failed clean.
Continued inside
By Justin Murray 2 min read
Almost nobody fires a cleaning company over one bad night. They fire one because the service they signed for quietly stopped being the service they were getting, and there was no single day it happened.
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By Tommy Bachus 2 min read
Those marks are in the floor finish, not the tile. Black marking that comes back within days is telling you something specific about that finish.
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By Justin Murray 2 min read
A monthly figure with nothing behind it is not a quote, it is a number you cannot hold anybody to. Here is what should be on the page, and the four questions that separate one vendor from another.
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By Tommy Bachus 2 min read
A cleaning round can only reach what it can touch. When a building smells musty the morning after it was cleaned, the source is usually somewhere no cleaner goes.
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By Bailey Cotter 2 min read
Vacuuming and extraction are two different line items doing two different jobs, and the interval between extractions is set by traffic rather than by a date in a contract.
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By Tommy Bachus 2 min read
The restroom is cleaned every night and it still announces itself from the corridor. That is almost always a porosity problem, and the products most buildings reach for make it worse.
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By Bailey Cotter 2 min read
Nobody asks until two days before handover, by which point it is not a negotiation any more. The answer was written into the construction contract months earlier, and it is different on a new build than on a renovation.
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By Tommy Bachus 2 min read
Cloudy, milky patches under a sealed surface are almost always moisture that cannot get out. In this climate that is a predictable outcome of two decisions, not bad luck.
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By Tommy Bachus 2 min read
Artificial turf is sold as the surface you stop maintaining, and mostly that is true. The exception is the part nobody can see, and hosing it makes that part worse.
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