Restroom Cleaning With A Day Porter

This is the second part of a three-part article about daytime restroom cleaning.

With a schedule now in place, monitoring the restroom between scheduled cleanings becomes an important part of any day cleaning operation.

Larger facilities will hire a day porter, whose job is to check the restrooms and perform restocking and cleaning periodically throughout the day.

“You don’t want to close the restroom down,” says Griffin. “So these people run in, push down the trash, wipe down the sinks and toilets, spot mop, and check the paper products and soap. They are in and out within five to 10 minutes.”

Lee recommends that day porters enter the restroom to perform one task at a time. Go in and perform a surface clean, then leave. Come back later and fill dispensers, then leave.

The frequency with which day porters must enter a restroom is determined by traffic within the building and within the each individual restroom, says Vosburg. It might be every hour or every three hours.

In a building where the occupants are predominantly one sex, BSCs will want to increase the frequency with which they clean that sex’s restrooms, since they will be used more heavily, says Lee. Having a female day porter to patrol the women’s restrooms and a male day porter for the men’s restrooms is also a good idea.

Harvard Maintenance employs an electronic counter in the facilities it maintains that counts how many people have been in the area and how often.

“That’s been very beneficial to us,” he says. “Ideally you want to clean prior to any dense population using the restroom and immediately after.”

The vulnerability of a building’s tenants also affects cleaning frequency, says Lee. BSCs may need to clean restrooms in schools and healthcare facilities more frequently than an office building, because children and the infirmed are more susceptible to illnesses from unsanitary restrooms.