Fixture Upgrades are a Win-Win for Customers and Maintenance

What do visitors expect from your restrooms? How can you reduce maintenance and cleaning times? These may seem like unrelated questions, until you consider restroom fixtures. Choosing the right plumbing fixtures for your facility can make the restroom experience more enjoyable for visitors and clean-up more pleasant for your staff.

Customers may care more about the condition and appearance of your restrooms than you think. Moreover, their opinion of the restroom impacts their opinion of the facility or company as a whole. In fact, visitors who are turned off by the restroom may simply not return.

Germs are of greater concern to restroom visitors than ever before — and with good reason. There is a whole range of germs and bacteria that visitors can pick up from restroom surfaces, which can cause everything from a nasty cold or case of diarrhea to more serious, even life-threatening, illnesses.

Although many restroom visitors blame the toilet for being the germ culprit, they’re not seeing the whole picture. Flush handles can certainly harbor bacteria, and that’s why some facilities are retrofitting their manual flush valve handles with battery-powered, sensor-operated kits.

Automatic operation gives users peace-of-mind by removing the need to touch the fixture. It’s important to look for a sensor retrofit kit with a mechanical manual over-ride that will flush even when the battery is low.

Christopher Newport University’s Ferguson Center for the Arts in Newport News, Va., already uses automatic flushing systems in one part of its building. David Carson, maintenance coordinator for the Ferguson Center, is considering retrofitting the rest of the center’s manual flush valves with electronic sensor operation to gain more of the sanitary and convenience advantages that come with automatic flushing.

The center’s two or three housekeepers have only 15 to 20 minutes between performances to clean the restrooms. The automatic flushing systems have helped cut their workload.

“As far as cleaning goes, we’ve saved time and effort,” says Carson.

Calls to maintenance to fix leaky toilets also have been reduced because of touch-free flushing.

“A lot of people use their foot to flush the commode, and that’s hard on the fixture,” Carson says.

Germs, Germs Everywhere
Besides toilets and urinals, many other places in the public restroom can be great germ transmitters. In fact, the sink area is often the dirtiest place in the restroom because people shed bacteria when washing their hands.

There are many other touchpoints in the restroom — restroom doors, stall doors, paper dispensers and manual hand dryers, to name a few — that aren’t likely to be cleaned as often as sinks and toilets.

The more touchpoints there are in the restroom, the more potential there is for sharing or catching germs. That is why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urges people to wash their hands regularly. Studies indicate that hand-washing is the single-most effective way to stop the spread of germs and disease.

It’s important for restroom fixtures to contribute to proper hand-washing. Not only should they make it easy for visitors to wash, but fixtures should also be designed so they don’t cross-contaminate hands. Cross-contamination occurs when someone touches a dirty surface after washing, such as the handle of a manual faucet or hand dryer.

Of course, the next obvious germ suspect is the door handle. Although some facilities have designed their restrooms with doorless entryways, most existing facilities can’t realistically get rid of their doors. Consequently, departing restroom visitors have to decide between using a paper towel to open the door or re-contaminating their hands by opening it themselves.

Because paper towel use brings added expense — as well as more mess, unless a garbage can is next to the door — some facilities are beginning to install automatic door-handle cleaners. These sensor-operated units, which mount on the door directly above the handle, periodically spray cleaner on the handle when users are out of range. That way, door handles are regularly cleaned and restroom visitors are comforted by the fact that yet another germ-ridden touchpoint has been addressed. These units can also be mounted on stall doors.

Sensor-operated plumbing fixtures and restroom accessories enable touchfree operation that alleviates germ concerns, while making the restroom experience more convenient and boosting a facility’s overall image.

You Want Fixtures That Last
Simply count the number of holes in the wall next to the sinks in an established public restroom where previous wall-mounted soap dispensers had been and you’ll understand how short the lifespan is of some of the cheaper restroom fixtures. Facility managers often find that they have to rip out one type of dispenser completely when it falls apart or causes more trouble than its worth, leaving them to find a replacement that inevitably doesn’t fit in the original unit’s mounting position.

Whether it’s soap dispensers, flush valves, faucets or any other restroom fixture, it’s worth it to invest in products that will work for the long run, so replacement doesn’t become an annual event. Look for fixtures made of high-quality materials that can stand up to high-use, and potentially high-abuse, restrooms. Places where mis-use is more likely to occur — such as school restrooms — are better off with fixtures that have vandal-resistant features, are firmly mounted and minimize the need to touch components that can be purposely damaged.

What Your Staff Wants:
Easy-to-Maintain Restrooms
You may be surprised at how much time your staff is wasting on certain restroom maintenance chores. Consider soap dispensers, for example. Manual soap dispensers can drip, or restroom visitors may inadvertently pump soap without having their hands in place, which can leave a big, soapy mess on the wall, the floor or wherever soap is falling.

Plus, how easy is it to refill your current soap dispensers? Refilling liquid soap can be messy and time-consuming. Pre-filled soap bottles and cartridges are smaller, meaning they’re easier to store and carry, and there’s no mess involved because refills simply slip or snap into place. Operators do have to keep in mind, though, that only certain types of soap or foam refills will work in those units.

How do you know when it’s time to refill your restrooms’ soap dispensers? Staff members only have a limited amount of time to maintain each restroom, so they appreciate when they can quickly identify what needs to be done. When staff members do quick restroom clean-up “fly-bys,” they may not see that dispensers are empty or not functioning properly.

On the low-tech end, soap dispensers have either transparent soap repositories or sight windows so you can see when soap is running low. More advanced electronic models use LED lights that flash on to indicate when a refill is required.

Encourage your staff to test each dispenser regularly to ensure that they’re not clogged or broken. Simply looking at the soap level isn’t enough. An adequate soap level either means that no refill is required or that restroom visitors can’t dispense any soap. When visitors can’t easily pump soap, they may roughly pull or push levers, which can damage the dispenser.

Restroom visitors and cleaning staff alike notice the difference between poorly designed and cheaply made fixtures and those that will last for years of reliable service.

Special Report from Sloan Jansan