It’s just like the name, GoFree; you can go anywhere with it,” said Matthew Brooks, Custodial Coordinator for Blue Valley School District, one of the major school districts in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area. The district recently implemented the ProTeam® GoFree® Flex Pro cordless backpack vacuum to reduce vacuuming time and improve safety.
The district’s 50+ facilities span 4.4 million square feet of space. Some of the older buildings have limited outlets making it difficult for Brooks’ staff to vacuum the buildings. He found custodians taking risks to get the job done.
“We had custodians that would tie together two or three extension cords,” said Brooks. “That’s a safety issue – not just tripping, but electrical shock.”
Now, when a custodian cleans with the GoFree Flex Pro cordless backpack vacuum, cord-related risks are eliminated, and cleaning is significantly faster.
It used to take three hours to vacuum 18 to 20 classrooms including hallways. Right away, the cordless backpack vacuum reduced that to just two hours. Now that the staff has been using the GoFree for a while, the time-savings is approaching 40 percent. Brooks attributes a lot of that savings to eliminating cord management tasks: unplugging, moving the cord, and plugging in again.
“We did not reduce any labor. We did this to enhance our cleaning, so we could do more for the building rather than cut time,” said Brooks.
The time saved from using cordless backpack vacuums has gone to dusting, spot cleaning carpets, and sanitizing desktops daily rather than every other day. The custodians also switched from rags to backpack vacuums for dusting. According to Brooks, backpacks are more effective at capturing dust.
“A backpack vacuum is one of the best ways to get the dirt out of the building. Everything we try and implement is based on removing,” said Brooks. “We use an auto scrubber instead of a mop, and a no-touch cleaning system in the restroom. Get the germs out of the building, don’t allow them to grow.”
The reallocation of time to improve cleaning has had measurable results. One school was hovering around a 2.5 on the APPA scale (where one is the highest standard of cleanliness and five is the lowest). Implementing the cordless backpack vacuums shot that school’s score to a 2.0.
“If you’re not maintaining your building so your students have a safe and clean environment, it hurts their ability to learn,” said Brooks. “We create and maintain exceptional learning environments for student success.”
ProTeam is a National Proud Partner of the American Lung Association, fighting with them for clean indoor air and developing innovative cleaning technologies to address indoor air quality concerns.
For more information, visit proteam.emerson.com.
