Out of hours office cleaning strategy
GEN02
Look across any central business district street scene through the late evening into the night and the office buildings are well and truly lit up, with many floors of spaces fully lit as an army of facilities staff prepare the building for the next day of business.
As the office workforce leave at the end of a day an unseen army of workers are deployed to prepare the facilities for the next working day, a legion of cleaners going about their business. The strategy they use to clean your office could be contributing to your energy wastage.
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A common mantra in driving performance standards is 'ownership', give responsibility for a specified area to a defined person and they can be held accountable for their performance. Office buildings lend themselves to this approach, where it is common to allocate a specified cleaner to specific floors. Let us look at what this means from an energy perspective.
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Let us assume our fictional building has 10 floors, with each floor taking one cleaner two hours to clean. Cleaner A starts at level 10 and works down through the building, finishing their work at level 6 ten hours later. Their colleague does the same, working from level 5 down to the ground floor. This is typical of a scenario that plays out every night in a vast number of buildings. As the cleaner works they need the lighting on and perhaps the air-conditioning. Meaning for each floor cleaned 2 hours of lighting and air-con energy is consumed. The building as a whole, being 10 floors, would consume 20 hours of lighting and air-conditioning each night to support the cleaning. A simple change can reduce this significantly.
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If instead of each cleaner working on separate floors they worked together, each floor now having 2 cleaners at work rather than 1, would take half the amount of time to clean. Each floor only taking 1 hour to clean would only require 1 hour of lighting and air-conditioning. Scaled across the building this change of cleaning strategy would result in 10 hours of power consumption rather than 20, delivering you a notable energy save!
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While every building is different any time you are deploying a distributed cleaning team you will be over using utility power compared with moving them through the building as a team.