How to budget for owning a piece of floor cleaning equipment: wearable parts, abuse/neglect, Preventative Maintenance programs etc.

When you go to purchase a vehicle you know there's the purchase price you agree to pay for the vehicle, and then there's the total cost you pay including interest to the bank (assuming you finance).  Then there's the first tank of gas, and the second ..... and the 100th.  And there's tires, oil changes, windshields, carwashes, transmission flushes, differential services and on and on.  

All of this together is the total cost of ownership.  And every one of us who buys a vehicle (new or used) should know this is part of the deal when we agree to the transaction.  But did you ever think about any of this being true for buying a piece of floor cleaning equipment?  Well, it's exactly the same.  Floor cleaning machines are really just small vehicles, but instead of transporting people/pets/groceries, they're transporting filth, soils and germs from the inside of our facilities to the outside. 

A savvy car buyer may use resources like Consumer Reports or Kelley Blue Book to do research on car values and expected reliability.  How else are you supposed to feel good about the minivan you're buying other than to brag on the good gas mileage and high customer satisfaction!  The point is, when you buy a vehicle, you know enough to think about long term ownership costs. You don't want to be buying another vehicle in 2-3 years because your total cost to own and maintain the vehicle is too expensive. 

Let's learn from our vast experience of car buying and apply that knowledge to buying a floor scrubber or sweeper.  We'll use a 28" disk walk behind floor scrubber as an example.  If purchased new, this new Tennant T500 could run as high as $17,000 depending on bells and whistles, or you could go for the refurbished Tennant T500 for around $6000. 

Once you own the machine, we have to dive into usage to determine more costs of ownership.  How many hours per day/week will it be used?  Facility type and operator background?  Will it be transported from site to site? Do we want Planned Maintenance to maximize uptime, or do we want to be reactive with our maintenance and only service when it breaks down?  Let's tackle these different factors.

How much and where will this machine get used?  Smaller walk-behind units like the Tennant T500 could be used in light duty traffic (e.g. church or office building) maybe 1-5 hours/week, medium duty traffic (e.g. nursing home) maybe 5-15 hours/week, or heavy duty traffic (e.g. grocery stores) where it's used all day every day even with customers nearby 30+ hours/week.  

Wearables like squeegees, filters and brushes/floor pads are going to be replaced differently based on these hours of use. 

Light Duty: twice/year or $10/month
Medium Duty: 4-5 times/year or $30/month   
Heavy Duty:  12+ times/year or $60/month

Will it be transported from site to site?  This may be a contractor who cleans more than one store/night or travels from job to job, or it may be a very large facility like a hospital that uses one machine for various departments.  The machine may be moved outside, down ramps, across a dock, up an elevator, over multiple uneven thresholds etc..  Walk-behind floor equipment, for the most part, is not designed for this kind of transport.  There are options like foam filled tires that can assist in beefing up the durability if you know on the front end what you're up against.  For the rest of us, if we move the machine this much on a regular basis, things are going to break, starting with the squeegee mounting brackets and casters, but you can also really start to jostle loose a lot of other items like brush actuators that lead to expensive repairs and machine failure.  

Suffice it to say, if you transport the machine a lot, you're going to have more breakdowns.  If it's the owner who's transporting the machine, you'll likely see less damage, but it's not completely avoidable.  If it's a hired hand, you've been forewarned!  

Do we want Planned Maintenance to maximize uptime, or do we want to be reactive with our maintenance and only service when it breaks down?  Now, we're getting to one of my favorites, the PM Agreement.  When used correctly, this can be one of the greatest add-ons to any equipment purchase.  And no, this isn't the $4.00 warranty that Amazon tries to add on to the electric pencil sharpener you just bought for $15, nor is it the $29.95 anything goes warranty that Best Buy tries to sell you for your new Apple Airpods. This is proactive, forward thinking, boy scout readiness for your cleaning equipment. 

A true PM agreement from SweepScrub like the PM Program for battery powered walk behind floor scrubbers for a Tennant T500 is a a regularly scheduled service designed to keep the machine in its best operable condition so you can reduce the down time from mechanical failure.  Unfortunately, it can't make your employees show up for work, but it can get your squeegees replaced if they're worn and streaking or replace that vac motor before it completely fails.  You probably didn't even notice the vac motor was getting louder because you hear it every day, but it was actually failing on you.  The tech can diagnose that.    

As mentioned above, if we're talking about an owner/operator contractor, he/she is going to be doing a lot of these eyeball checks every day.  For the rest of us relying on our hourly employees to operate the machine, this scheduled PM visit with a trained tech is going to be our audit on how the machine is really being used and taken care of.  

One of the single largest expenses related to floor cleaning equipment is batteries.  Regardless of which battery type you select (blog post on battery types), they're eventually going to be replaced, and they can be as much as a third or half of the value of the machine depending on how old it is.  If the water isn't properly maintained on basic lead acid batteries, the batteries can die a rather quick death.  Nothing is worse than presenting a manager with the bad news that their relatively new floor scrubber needs $1000-1500 in new batteries, and even worse, that they're not covered under warranty because they weren't maintained correctly. 

We hope this article helps you think through some of the long term costs of cleaning equipment ownership.  Happy Shopping!