You Can’t Touch This! The Benefits of No-Touch Cleaning Caddies

By: Chris Meyer  |  September 12, 2019

A Harris Interactive Survey found that 94% of adults surveyed would avoid a business in the future if they encountered a dirty restroom.

So if you want to prevent customers from walking out the door, you shouldn’t be relying on outdated equipment like string or flat mops to keep your restrooms clean.

Modern, no-touch cleaning caddies are far more efficient and hygienic. In fact, here are a few of the no-touch cleaning caddy’s most significant benefits compared to traditional equipment.

More Effective Cleaning

A no-touch cleaning caddy, like the WAXIE VERSA High Performance No-Touch Cleaning Caddies, uses the High Flow Fluid Extraction (HFFE) cleaning process. The HFFE process uses a combination of a flow of fresh ingredients, agitation with a brush, dwell time to loosen soils, and a vacuum to suction it all away.

This is important because the HFFE process has been proven to be significantly more effective than traditional cleaning methods like mopping.

In a study, Kaivac Cleaning Systems compared the efficacy of the HFFE process against mopping with a string or flat mop.

The study found that the HFFE process:

• Has a cleaning efficiency of 98% for removing residue from a grouted surface compared to a string or flat mop’s cleaning efficiency of 38%
• Leaves 35 times less residual bacteria than a string or flat mop
• Results in 12 to 13 times less urine residue than a string or flat mop

The reasons HFFE is so much more effective are as much about the inefficiencies of mops as they are about efficiencies in the HFFE cleaning process.

Mops pick up soils which remain in the mop until it’s dipped back into the cleaning solution. At that point, the solution becomes contaminated. As a result, mops often just push around contaminated water that eventually dries in your grout lines. Cleaning caddies have no such disadvantage because the cleaning solution is consistently replenished.

Put simply, HFFE cleans better because it provides a continuous flow of fresh cleaning solution, it leaves no moisture or residue, and it effectively agitates soils in places that mops can’t.

Improved Cleaning Staff Productivity

The best no-touch cleaning caddies are equipped with automatic chemical metering and injection, a powerful indoor pressure washer, and a wet vacuum. All that equipment in one caddy adds up to faster, more productive cleaning staff.

With a pressure washer, it’s much easier to clean hard-to-reach areas than it is with a mop. In fact, the professionals at Kaivac say their caddy can cut the time it takes to clean a bathroom in half. Even for a small or medium-sized facility with just a few bathrooms, that time savings can turn into significantly smaller labor costs. Plus, with a WAXIE VERSA, you’ll have the benefit of the KaiTutor™ video training device which helps ensure that your staff is being fully productive by helping them learn the proper use of the no-touch cleaning caddy.

A Healthier Building

No-touch caddies improve the wellness of your facility and its occupants. Two of the most significant ways they do this is by 1) preventing cross-contamination and 2) removing bacteria and residue from hard-to-clean areas like grout lines.

With string or flat mops, to prevent cross-contamination requires constant vigilance about what equipment you use and where you use it. If the wrong equipment is used somewhere it shouldn’t be, you risk bringing bacteria such as Staphylococcus Aureus or E. Coli from the bathroom into other rooms in the facility. With a no-touch cleaner, that risk is significantly reduced.

Just as importantly, the HFFE process of a no-touch cleaning tool can agitate, clean and remove the stinky bacteria, dirt, gunk, and residues that a mop can’t get out. As a result, your bathroom (and your building) smells better because gunk isn’t left to fester in your grout lines and stink up the place.

Labor and Materials Cost Savings

Of course, with more efficient equipment like the no-touch cleaning caddy, you might expect to pay more. But while a caddy will cost more than a mop, you’ll get back—at least—a portion of that cost with:

• Lower labor expenses as a result of shortened cleaning times
• Lower chemical costs with the no-touch caddy’s automatic proportioning

In fact, if you want to actually calculate how much a no-touch cleaning caddy could save you, click the link below and check out the cost-savings calculator that Kaivac Cleaning Systems created. Since every facility is different, Kaivac Cleaning Systems’ calculator takes your facility’s unique specifications to calculate the potential cost savings of using a no-touch caddy.

How Much Could You Save?

It’s important to remember that this isn’t just about cost savings for the facilities department. It’s bigger than that. In schools, students are less likely to wash their hands when a restroom is poorly maintained, increasing the likelihood of sickness spreading and absenteeism rising among students.

In the study we mentioned to open this article, 94% of adults said they’d avoid a business in the future because of dirty restrooms. In other words, for every customer that walks into your business’s restroom when it’s dirty, more than 9 out of every 10 will avoid coming back to your business.

That’s a serious problem.

Fortunately, it’s not that hard to solve when you’ve got a no-touch caddy to make cleaning easier, quicker, and more effective… reducing the chances that your restroom will be dirty at any given time. And, more importantly, reducing the chances that your business will lose customers.

If you’re interested in solving the problems that old methods of cleaning create, get in touch with a WAXIE Account Consultant. They’ll help you find the no-touch cleaning caddy that’s right for you, show you how to incorporate it into your cleaning routing, and train your staff on best practices.

* Updated on March 29, 2021 to include expanded WAXIE VERSA product line reference.