What Are The Different Types of Cleaning Materials?
Cleaning services must often clean in situations where cleaning agents are not appropriate, or they are inaccessible. For example, cleaning professionals may encounter cleaning needs that arise after a natural disaster when cleaning supplies are destroyed.
Other cleaning needs occur based on the time available to complete cleaning tasks. For instance, cleaning services might use dry cleaning materials to quickly purge surfaces of potentially harmful contaminants when there is no time to conduct more thorough wet cleaning procedures.
Types of Cleaning Materials
There are three types of cleaning materials: wet, dry, and heat/steam cleaners.
Dry Surface Cleaners
Dry surface cleaning kills most microbes through the removal of dirt rather than chemical disinfection. A professional cleaning service may need to use different types of cleaners to meet cleaning needs.
Dry surface cleaning kills microbes using physical processes without introducing moisture. This cleaning method is faster than wet cleaning, but it requires cleaning services to use cleaning agents that are effective against all microorganisms of concern. Since this cleaning approach does not involve releasing water into the environment, it reduces the risk for exposure to microbes and exposure-related health risks (e.g., skin irritation)
Wet Surface Cleaners
Wet cleaning is effective for cleaning most surfaces, but it can be time-consuming and increases the risk of damage to specialized surfaces that might require dry cleaning only. Wet cleaning can also release contaminants from porous materials, creating a need to pre-flush before applying a damp cleaner.
This occurs when cleaning services use water to flush dirt from pores or remove particulate matter from nonporous surfaces, including sealed hard floors and walls. In these scenarios, residual moisture increases the risk for infection growth and allergic reactions in occupants. Additionally, wet cleaning is not appropriate when microbial spores are outside their growth range (e.g., low-temperature regions).
Heat/Steam Cleaners
Heat/steam cleaners kill microbes through the direct application of heat or steam onto heating surfaces. This process is more effective than dry cleaning because spores are more vulnerable to elevated temperature exposures than vegetative cells.
They can also clean dirty surfaces without releasing chemicals into the environment, making them ideal for cleaning porous surfaces like carpets soiled with biohazardous matter since they do not dissolve or release particulate matter into the atmosphere.
Heat/steam cleaning is an excellent choice for cleaning services that need to clean before and after repairs, renovations, or demolitions because they do not produce dust as a cleaning product.
While heat/steam cleaning does involve chemical cleaning agents, these chemicals are typically in minimal quantities and can be used in combination with other cleaning agents to increase effectiveness. Steam cleaners may also be more effective at killing certain microorganisms, such as those found on nonporous surfaces like sealed hard flooring.
What to Expect from Professional Cleaning Services
Cleaning services must often clean when protective equipment is required for occupant safety or environmental protection purposes.
For instance, medical facilities often require face masks during cleaning procedures to protect patients and cleaning staff from exposure to infectious contaminants. Protective equipment is also commonly needed in mold infestation or hazardous spills since cleaning agents do not bind to substrate as efficiently when attached to organic matter.
In some cases, cleaning services must use cleaning agents that produce fumes as a by-product of cleaning instead of heat/steam cleaning because materials cannot withstand direct exposure to high temperatures. For instance, cleaning service staff might use chlorine bleach solutions to disinfect biohazardous wastes due to contaminants like bloodborne pathogens that resist heat/steam cleaning methods. Cleaning services can reduce fumes produced during this process by diluting the bleach with water, reducing its effectiveness against microbes.
Finally, cleaning services might use high-pressure cleaning to remove dirt and debris from hard surfaces without releasing cleaning agents into the environment. This method uses cleaning equipment to generate a high-speed water jet that forces contaminants off surfaces at pressures above what is possible with wet cleaning methods. Pressure cleaners are used for removing heavily soiled or burnt materials that cannot be cleaned using wet cleaning methods such as walls and floors affected by fire damage. High-pressure cleaning is also sometimes used in conjunction with other cleaning methods such as steam/heat cleaning to loosen difficult soils before they can be removed from surfaces, but this typically does not produce better results than conventional steam/heat cleaning alone when it comes to disinfecting surfaces against microorganisms.
