Stripping floors is a time-consuming and tedious job, but it doesn’t have to be. Centaur Floor Machines has developed the perfect solution for commercial cleaners – using our revolutionary 40 lb horseshoe weights, you can now strip your floors in half the time!
What’s The Biggest Cost When Stripping Floors?
When floor stripping, most commercial cleaners are focused on the cost of the equipment and chemicals used to carry out the job.
However, labor is your biggest cost and here’s why:
If you consider a typical 4000 sq ft job, according to ISSA work rates, it typically takes about 5 hours to strip the wax off the floors.
If you add some additional time for clean-up after or prep time beforehand, the job takes you roughly 7 hours to complete.
If you’re paying $20/hr in labor, the labor alone for this job will be $140.
Compare that to the cost of stripping pads, and chemicals for the job (about $50) and the amortized cost of the floor machine for the same job (about $10) = $60
In the above scenario, the labor cost ($140) makes up 70% of the total cost ($200) of doing the job. So, if you find any way to cut down the time it takes to complete the job, you’re going to be contributing more profit to your bottom line.
How Did Centaur Come Up With a Faster Way To Strip Floors?
Tony Lelkes (Centaur’s founder) always had an instinctual way of improving things when it came to floor care and maintenance. His 50+ years in business and his knack for working with machines had made him a master craftsman who is not afraid to experiment when he feels there’s something that needs improvement.
One day Tony observed how laborious it was for custodial staff to strip floors at a large high school here in Toronto – so much time was being spent on just this one task!
He saw this as being inefficient since large teams were required to spend a big chunk of the summer break stripping wax off the floors. This task required many man-hours and staff needed to get the job done.
That’s when Tony had an idea about tackling this problem. He thought that if there’s a way to add more weights to the machine, he could create more downward pressure onto the floor pad and create extra “bite” into the layers of wax to make the job go faster.
And so, he engineered and experimented with different types of weight shapes and sizes and eventually came up with the 40 lb horseshoe weight.
He found that when he put ONE 40 lb weight on a floor buffer, he improved the efficiency by 25%. In other words, a job that normally takes 4 hours would now only take 3 hours to complete.
He also discovered that when he added a 2nd weight on a floor buffer, for a total of 80 lb additional weight, he could get the same 4-hour job completed in just 2 hours (or half the time) giving professional cleaners and floor maintenance crew significant savings in time and money.
How Do Machine Weights Work?
When you’re stripping the wax off floors, you do that by swinging a floor machine in a side-to-side motion.
This is because the entire weight of the machine rests on the floor pad that’s doing the “cleaning/scrubbing/stripping” work for you.
And it’s the weight of the machine that provides the force and downward pressure on the floor pad so that the floor pad can “bite” into the wax on the floor.
So by using weights, you create more downward force on the floor pad, and you can create more “bite” into the wax, and that means your floor pads work even harder on the floors.
Making things easier for you.
It’s the same concept that applies when you’re using a small brush in your hand to scrub a floor.
The more weight and force you apply on the brush, the better the brush works and the better results you get.
Also, the 40 lb horseshoe weight is designed to sit snuggly around the base of the Centaur floor machine.
And the reason Tony designed the weight in a horseshoe shape, is so that it stays secure while the machine is being used a side-to-side motion.
The horseshoe shape also ensures you get maximum and equal downward force applied evenly to the floor pad so you get better cleaning results.
To learn more about how to strip floors twice as fast, watch this short explainer video: How To Strip Floors In HALF The Time Without Overworking Yourself