Tornado’s BR 13/1 MW Applauded

Hospitals are busy places, and they are becoming big places as well. For instance, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical located in Lebanon, New Hampshire, includes several buildings, medical offices, patient areas, children’s areas, and even a shopping mall.

Over the years, Dartmouth-Hitchcock has earned a reputation for being one of the best maintained and most environmentally responsible hospitals in the country. When administrators from other medical facilities visit, they often note that large sections of the hospital are carpeted—especially the main-floor business offices, common areas, and mall—while other areas are tiles and grout flooring.

Traditionally, this would require two sets of equipment for maintenance: portable extractors to clean the carpets and floor machines such as auto-scrubbers to clean the hard-surface floors. This is costly and calls for considerable storage space as well as worker training on two different types of machines. Fortunately, hospital administrators have the option of doing both of these tasks with one machine: the new BR 13/1 from Tornado®.

The BR 13/1 cleans carpets quietly using the encapsulation system. The relatively new technology uses chemicals and detergents to “surround” soils in the carpet fibers and crystallize them so that they can be removed by vacuuming. Carpets cleaned with encapsulation dry quickly.

This is why administrators at medical facilities and other 24-hour locations are enthusiastic about the system. And because little moisture is involved in the encapsulation method, there is reduced chance that mold or mildew can develop, helping to protect indoor air quality.

Although the encapsulation method is viewed as an “interim” carpet cleaning system, it has proved to be effective. In most cases, carpets can be cleaned up to three times with encapsulation before they must be extracted, a major time saver that also minimizes the amount of time hospital areas must be blocked off to allow carpets to dry.

For tile and grout floors, the BR 13/1 system has twin, counter-rotating brushes, similar to cylindrical brush technology. This enables it to reach deep into porous floor areas and grout to loosen and remove soils and contaminants.

And because the brushes do most of the work, less chemical and water is necessary in the cleaning process, making the machine more environmentally responsible. In fact, studies report that cylindrical brush technology uses as much as 30 percent less water and chemical than conventional floorcare equipment, and the brushes last as much as 100 times longer than the pads used on conventional machines.

An added benefit hospitals and other large facilities have found using the BR 13/1 is its remarkable versatility. The machine can be used to clean carpets, entry mats, escalators, and hard-surface floors with no need to change tools and wands, add attachments, or offer specialized worker training.