The i-mop In Action At Willetton Senior High School

We recently visited Willetton Senior High School – a large public secondary school in Perth, Western Australia – to see the i-mop in action on a range of flooring areas.

Cleaning of floors in schools is one of the largest parts of the job for school cleaning staff. They're faced with a broad range of floor surfaces: tiles, timber floors, vinyls, concrete and polished concrete floors, epoxy/resin floors, carpeted and flotex floors – almost every common flooring variant.

Then there are the range of different soiling types found on schools floors: clay and crayon marks in the art room, trafficked soil in entries and hallways, oily soil in entries and areas around the canteen and home economics area, and uric acid and body soils in bathrooms.

Focusing our attention on cleaning the hard floors, this combination of flooring types and soils is made more complex due to the distributed nature of school floors. Most schools are made up of a lot of small-to-medium sized areas – hallways, classrooms and traffic areas with some larger multipurpose and gymnasium types areas. This means that, while floor cleaning machines or autoscrubbers may be great for cleaning gymnasiums and large school halls, their bulky size makes them completely impractical for cleaning in a classroom, the toilets, or the many other smaller floor areas of the school.

In most schools, these smaller floor spaces of 10 to 200 square meters are typically mopped by hand, as there has simply not been a viable alternative.

Manual mopping is slow, poses manual handling and slip and fall safety risks, and gives very poor hygiene results compared to the mechanical cleaning action of an autoscrubber machine. The i-mop eliminates these challenges, combining the agility and small space cleaning ability of a manual mop with the mechanical scrubbing power and fast cleaning speed of an autoscrubber.

The i-mop is proven to drastically reduce time spent on industrial floor cleaning in both small and large areas, while delivering vastly superior cleaning, environmental and safety performance.

We recently visited the school to see the i-mop in action and hear the head cleaner's thoughts on the i-mop.