Okay, you don’t want to think about winter, especially in the tail end of summer, but it’s a good idea to plan ahead. For any commercial facility, floor maintenance is a year-round process and the earlier you begin planning for the winter months, the more prepared you and your maintenance department will be when the snow and ice begin to fall.
Here are a few tips to remember that will help you be better prepared for the winter season ahead.
Establish a regular cleaning schedule.
Keeping up with the floor surfaces during the summer may be a lot easier than during the winter. Your maintenance department may have cut back on stripping, polishing, waxing, and other procedures by a couple of days every week, but they will need to increase the cleaning schedule again for the winter months ahead.
That means fewer available man-hours for other tasks. What needs to be done is figuring out what is more important: keeping up with the commercial floor surfaces or working on other aspects of maintenance.
Plan out the strategic placement of protective mats.
Scraper and extraction methods can be extremely beneficial for all commercial facilities. Scraper mats will generally be made out of rubber or some rubber like material and will have deep grooves that are specifically designed to capture as much snow and other debris as possible.
Extraction mats are more like carpeted material and are designed to be placed after the scraper mats to absorb whatever remaining moisture there is.
Having these ready to go and even a cleaning company to pick them up and replace them with fresh, clean mats every week or every day or however often is necessary, is a great idea to consider.
Prepare for extreme weather.
High rates of snowfall, ice, freezing rain, and more can all cause havoc for many commercial facilities. Have your maintenance department run exercises so they know where all the warning signs are to be placed to indicate wet and slick floor surfaces, who would be responsible for what task, and then, when the time comes for these events, it will be easier to keep those facilities safe and clean.