FOGGING TO DEEP CLEANING Covid-19 has brought cleaning protocols in hotels sharply into focus. Hotel Scotland looks at how hotels are adapting to keep guests safe, while weighing up the pros and cons of some of the most widely used cleaning methods available.
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uests checking into The Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills might just bump into the hotel’s latest line in cleaning defence against coronavirus – a three-foot-tall robot called Kennedy. It’s a machine designed to kill the virus by flashing intense, germ-killing ultraviolet light through the room after the room has undergone the usual cleaning by Kennedy’s human co-workers. Along similar lines, ultraviolet light (UVC) disinfection lamps designed to sanitise all exposed room surfaces and frequent touch-points and UV-C disinfection, or germicidal ultra-violet irradiation (UVGI) as it is known are available to hoteliers. This technology was first introduced in the 1900s and is widely used in hospitals as part of standard disinfection protocols. Compared to familiar disinfection methods that use liquid and powder-based disinfectants, ultraviolet disinfection lamps use no chemicals and leave no residue or by-products. Other cleaning processes include the traditional deep clean, fogging, and electrostatic spraying of course – or a combination of these methods. The received wisdom is that you can’t kill off germs or viruses without effective deep cleaning. This is the removal of soiling, visible of invisible, from a surface, sanitising to reduce bacteria and germs, followed by disinfection to remove bacteria and germs. This service is usually charged per square foot, based on the companies Hotel Scotland has spoken to. You can sanitise a surface without necessarily cleaning it first or you can have one product or process that does both. But you cannot disinfect without first thoroughly cleaning. That’s why it’s important to deep clean if you want to disinfect. A thorough physical deep clean requires that the operative must physically touch every part of a surface, requiring diligence, plus the risk to operatives is arguably greater. The risk of human error is also a factor. Fogging is atomising a chemical to apply it directionally as a mist. It disperses this fine mist or fog of high-grade disinfectant that kills pathogens.
The particles are so small that they remain suspended in the air long enough to kill both airborne and surface-based viruses as well as bacteria in hard to reach places such as ceilings, walls, crevices as well as furniture, floors, and equipment. Fogging is directional and so the operative could arguably miss a spot using this method, yet one of the upsides of this method is that they don’t have to physically touch surfaces. Electrostatic spraying applies a coating, cleaner, disinfectant, or other liquid that is applied with an electric charge so that it fully coats a surface. The electrostatic charge clings to surfaces but it may not guarantee the full coverage of, say, a deep clean - i.e. on every single surface. Stephen Montgomery is the owner of The Townhouse Hotel in Lockerbie whose staff are now taking significantly longer to clean guest rooms, plus he has invested in his own fogging and swabbing equipment once he got a pre-reopening industrial deep clean after lockdown. He said, “We have eight bedrooms and each one now takes an extra 15 – 20 minutes for a turndown. A complete strip-down now takes approximately 45 minutes. A full exit is now about an hour and 20 minutes compared to half an hour pre-pandemic. All of this has a wages impact. “Before we reopened after lockdown we got a company to do a complete deep clean. This entailed a deep clean and a fogging machine, for which they charged per square foot, plus they took swabs before and after, the results from which we posted on social media and this proved to be good for boosting customer confidence going on all the positive feedback we got. “We have since purchased our own fogging and swabbing machines, which can be quite fun as well as keeping housekeeping on their toes because the swabbing machine gives readings on lots of things in addition to COVID. You input all the readings from all types of surfaces - like remote controls, light switches, etc. – plus the room number. The machine then selects at random a room and a surface to spot-check going forward.”
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