Bathroom malodors. Not exactly a glamorous subject to ponder, but an important one, nonetheless. Bad odors can be a serious problem for contract cleaners or housekeeping managers responsible for keeping bathrooms clean. Regardless of how spotless a facility might appear to the eye, if the nose detects bad odors you can bet users of that room will wag their tongues and bend the ears of those in charge. Those complaints reflect on indoor air quality and can damage the image of the culprit organization.

Cleaning staffs have a vested interest in creating and implementing effective odor control programs.

And according to Juliet Ciardo, manager of Classic Cleaning Systems in the Milwaukee suburb of Greenfield, Wis., controlling those odors can be profitable for sanitary maintenance distributors, too. People today are becoming more and more concerned about air quality, smells and cleanliness. She reports that Classic Cleaning Systems’ sales of odor-related products have been climbing.

“I think there’s good potential for distributors to sell products and programs to their customers to solve or prevent odor problems,” she ventures.

No Easy Answers
So, how does one go about confronting those problems?

According to sanitary maintenance distributors acquainted with this aspect of the business, there’s no universal answer to that question.

“Each situation is different,” says Dave Teitelbaum, president and owner of Earthenair Inc., in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. “You’ve got to go in, assess the situation, and identify the source. Usually in a rest room there are a myriad sources of odors and each source must be considered and treated,” he says. “Natural odors occur there, as well as odors caused by dirt or bacteria. In some cases you get odors coming from drains.”

Gene Spinozzi, general manager of Cleanway Sanitary Supply in Bakersfield, Calif., suggests using inspection lights when checking out the sources of odors. “Black lights can solve problems where you can’t normally see sources, such as hidden soil. And using inspection mirrors enables you to get to hard-to-see places,” he adds.

Address the Actual Problem
Experts agree that the No. 1 goal is to clean the bathroom and eliminate those sources. “That can be done in different ways — disinfecting and cleaning surfaces, using enzymes in the drains,” says Teitelbaum. “You should always try to eliminate the source rather than masking it,” he advises. “If you just mask the odor, you’re not solving the problem.”

Larry Johnson, product manager for S. Freedman and Sons Inc., Landover, Md., agrees that different programs should be created for different customers. “We try to evaluate the situation each time and try to discover the problem,” he explains. “Then we recommend to our customers what we consider to be the best initial solution. After that we advise them on what to do to maintain the bathroom.”

Johnson’s company recently worked with a cleaning contractor who had a new office building to service.

“We went there with him and through a careful inspection learned that the original contractor was cleaning only what they could see in the rest rooms and not taking adequate time to do the job right. So we designed a program utilizing a floor machine with an agitation brush, a dry vac, and a strong disinfectant cleaner to be applied to the floors and walls.

“Essentially we recommended an initial, thorough GI-type cleaning,” he says. At first, this actually created more odors by reactivating all the dormant smells. “But that showed us that the procedure was going to work and eliminate the odors. We then put them on a maintenance program involving mopping floors and cleaning toilets and urinals every day with a cleaner/disinfectant/deodorizer type of product,” he continues.

“They use it in a mop bucket and spray bottle. And they spot clean the partitions between the urinals and the toilets. Each night they take a mop bucket and dump the water down the drain to make sure the drain stays fresh,” he explains. Once a week the cleaners also wipe down the walls with a disinfectant cleaner — up to four to six feet from the floor.

Johnson states that tile floors in men’s rooms are often sources of odors because urine gets into the tile grout, which is not adequately cleaned. “Scrub tile floors and grout with the floor machine to make sure you prevent build-up. Remember, you can mop every day but soil goes into the grout and you need to be aggressive with the grout.”

Ciardo says she, too, doesn’t have a standard program for her customers.

“There are too many variables. I mostly listen to the customer and observe things to find out what’s going on. If the bathroom is a big one and is cleaned often I usually recommend using a metered aerosol,” she says.

Ciardo recommends wick deodorants for smaller bathrooms. Both large and small benefit from an odor counteractive. “Put that in the mop bucket with a disinfectant that doesn’t have a smell of its own,” she says. “You can also put the counteractive in a spray bottle with water and use it before concluding the cleaning job. And if it’s a men’s room you want to make sure that you always use a urinal screen.”

Taper the Program
Tim Cotton, sales manager for Nelson Industrial Supply, Massilon, Ohio, says that a customer’s budget and desire for the amount of sophisticated odor control dictates an odor control program.

“Before anything else, we learn about the situation and try to design a rest room maintenance program that will eliminate the need for odor control,” he says. “If you can do a good, thorough job of cleaning and disinfecting at the source of the problem, then many times you can eliminate the need for air freshener add-ons. In other words, get the problem solved before it begins.”

If a customer wants to make it a simple, low-maintenance, low-labor program, Cotton says he goes with a wick system, where a liquid absorbed up into the wick and dispersed through air currents. “We also use battery-operated gel dispensers for a rest room that doesn’t have natural air flow or consistent airflow,” he says.

“We’ll present three or four different systems to a customer and let them choose based on budget and the amount of maintenance time they will allocate.”

The experts also agree that proper training of cleaning personnel is key to success.

“The weakness in our industry is training,” Cotton says. “It’s true of manufacturers, distributors and end users. I’ve been in this industry for 17 years and although I’ve seen training improve over the years, I still think it’s a top issue,” he continues. “To train people adequately about proper cleaning procedure and odor control, there must be an understanding of what odors are, where they originate and how they originate. A lot of cleaners don’t understand that.”

Training Benefits
Proper training is “incredibly important,” according to Ciardo. Distributors need to train people on the correct use of disinfectants, she says. “They must know that you have to allow dwell time; you must give these products time to work. You can’t spray and wipe immediately thereafter.”

Teitelbaum suggests spending a lot of time training your customers on rest room maintenance.

“If you don’t have access to a training program, use the ISSA (International Sanitary Supply Association) program. It’s very good. But the best training is on-the-job training by someone who really knows what he’s doing. You can’t train in an office. You’ve got to be out in the field.”

Odor control can sometimes be a daunting challenge, but the experts agree that strong, knowledgeable efforts will bring about significant success.

Jordan Fox is a Milwaukee-based writer and editor.




POSTED ON: 3/1/2001