Originally posted – Dec 27, 2013
I recently conducted a webinar for the Coin Laundry Association, dealing with commercial stain removal. After my presentation, I received a number of great questions from the attendees, so I thought I would share of few of them here (along with their answers, of course):
How much wash-dry-fold laundry should an employee be able to produce per day?
First of all, you need to ask yourself how important your self-service customers are to your business. If you’ve got a store that’s pretty slow and doesn’t require a lot of attention during the day, an employee should be able to dedicate 80 percent of his or her time to producing wash-dry-fold items. If that’s the case, they should be able to produce about 30 pounds an hour on a five-, six- or seven-hour shift.
As a side note, I’ve discovered that the average employee’s production drops off by about 20 percent after six hours. Therefore, we try to keep our employees shifts to six hours or less when it comes to doing wash-dry-fold work.
That said, if you’ve got a busier store with a good deal of walk-in clientele, you need to pay attention to the store and those self-service customers. In such cases, that amount of wash-dry-fold work produced could drop as low as 15 or 20 pounds an hour. After all, your self-service customers need attention, and a busy store will require a good deal of cleaning.
If that’s your situation, you may need to consider adding another attendant.
At my store, we often will have one employee on the floor, helping the customers; in addition, this attendant will be washing and drying drop-off loads and also ringing up any orders. Meanwhile, we’ll have a second employee working strictly on wash-dry-fold production work.
If you have a busy store, it might make sense to have an attendant at the front of your store helping the customers and ringing up orders, as well as having a second “production person” in the back out of the way.
It all depends on your store’s layout – as well as how much walk-in business you do, versus drop-off laundry. However, the point is that you need to designate responsibilities. And an employee who is dedicated strictly to wash-dry-fold orders should be able to produce about 30 pounds an hour.
Of course, that 30-pounds-per-hour benchmark gets skewed if you’re also considering certain types of commercial laundry, where the production process can be very repetitive. In fact, the production rate can jump as high as 50 pounds an hour. With items like large, heavier hotel towels, I know employees who can produce 100 pounds an hour.
Then again, everything goes in the opposite direction is you have a 100-pound order consisting of 50 percent kids’ clothes.
What are “greasers?”
In certain parts of the country, oil drilling is booming. And where there is oil drilling, there are oil well and oil refinery workers who are getting at least some of that oil on their uniforms, which are called “greasers.” In addition, mechanics in manufacturing plants and auto shops that deal with oil, grease and other types of petroleum products also may be in need of your store’s services.
After all, none of these potential customers want to take home their work clothes – coveralls, jeans, welding shirts and caps, Carhartt jackets, etc. – and wash them in their home washers and dryers.
Personally, my laundromat is not located in an area that has a lot of this type of work being done. However, I have customers who bring in their laundry from their work sites, because they simply can’t find laundry facilities that can do the job elsewhere.
The first component in removing oil stains is water temperature. If you choose to launder oily garments, it’s critical that you use higher-than-normal water temperatures, as it’s nearly impossible to use enough detergent to break down oil stains in today’s standard laundromat water temperatures.
If you’re going to truly attack any type of oil-based chemicals, you need to be willing to raise your water temperature to more than 130 degrees; and when I say 130 degrees, I’m referring to the water temperature in the washer, which means that your water heater needs to be set to at least 140 degrees.
Next, as I’ve discussed in previous articles, it’s important for you to understand that – for every 15 degrees in water temperature over the 100-degree mark – you’re going to receive twice the efficiency from any of the cleaning chemicals you inject into that stain-fighting equation.
Therefore, you need to carefully proportion whatever chemistry you’re adding in. For example, if your water is at 130 degrees, you’re probably going to have to add twice the amount of chemicals to get the job done as you would if you were at the 145- or 160-degree mark.
Another key factor to successful handling oily loads is to wash them in machines that are programmed with multiple rinses, because it’s going to take more than one rinse to get most of those stains out.
At my store, I have one machine that is dedicated for most of our heavy commercial laundry washing. It’s a 60-pound washer, which features a hot-water pre-wash cycle where chemicals can be added. The hot-water wash cycle is 25 minutes long, and the first rinse is a hot rinse that’s 10 minutes long. This first hot rinse is crucial because we’re still actually washing the garments during this cycle; the wash cycle flushes away a lot of the stain, but there is still chemistry working during that first rinse. The last two rinses are cold rinses, and by that time everything should be completely flushed out.
With this dedicated washer, we’ve got options for the extra washes and upgraded cycles. We can opt to have a pre-wash or not, as well as a last rinse or not. And we can shorten and change the cycles.
Of course, for oily work, we opt for the pre-wash, the wash and the last rinse, because those loads are the worst items we can possibly put in our machine. Plus, we want to do the load only once. The other option would be to wash these garments twice. Even if you opt to run them through twice, you still need to raise your water temperature.
However, if you’re serious about doing this type of business, the best course of action is to have machines that are specifically programmed to some of the cycles that are dedicated for these garments. It’s also wise to keep these machines separate from the equipment your self-service customers normally use, if possible.
Is powdered chlorine bleach better than the liquid version?
Traditionally, powdered products tend to be a little bit stronger. They also tend to be a bit more stable.
Commercial bleaches are typically comprised of anywhere from 11 percent to 18 percent bleach, while an over-the-counter bleach maybe be more like 2 percent bleach.
Because liquid bleaches are less stable than powdered bleaches, the bleach within the liquid products tends to gas off very quickly, sapping it of its bleaching ability. It might have a shelf life of six to nine months, before it starts to lose effectiveness.
The reason many people use liquid detergents and liquid bleaches is because their reactions are immediate. Of course, powdered bleaches also will dissolve quickly and begin reacting; however, with some powdered products, if you don’t have the water temperature high enough, they won’t dissolve and become active.
If you’re consuming enough liquid bleach to where it’s not losing its bleach ability, I would consider using liquid bleach. If you’re not, I would think about going with powdered bleach.
As a general rule, liquid bleaches tend to lose a lot of their effectiveness over time, whereas powdered bleaches are stable.
With that said, there are some chemical manufacturers that claim they have stabilized their liquid chlorine bleaches at about 11 percent, and that the products will remain stable for long periods. Personally, I haven’t used those specific products, so I can’t comment on their particular shelf lives.
For more information about Jeff Gardner’s next CLA webinar, visit coinlaundry.org.
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