CHICAGO — Textile care facilities come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from massive plants processing linens commercially to tiny rooms hidden away in the basements of buildings. For those businesses and institutions that prefer to keep their laundry processing in-house, such as in common environments like hotels and hospitals, a unique set of challenges greets their laundry operators every day.
That is also true for laundries serving niche markets, where processing environments don’t mirror those of more traditional OPLs, and where laundry might only be a small cog in a large wheel. Regardless of these differences, laundries in niche markets are like other OPLs in that they need the right equipment for the job.
American Laundry News spoke to some manufacturers and distributors of laundry equipment designed to address the needs of these niche markets. They shared the requirements and considerations of less-than-common OPLs, such as those found in car washes, cruise ships, spas, salons, athletic facilities and party rental companies.
CRUISE SHIPS: TIGHT QUARTERS, NUMEROUS WORKAROUNDS
Gary Lazarre, product support director for Pellerin Milnor, describes the laundry area onboard a ship as highly organized, since there’s not much space to spare in this environment, especially for storage of soiled and clean linen.
“The workspace, in general, is tight,” he says. “There’s tight headroom, and the laundry room is typically shoehorned into the bottom of the ship, with little thought other than fitting all of the equipment into a space.”
Even if the equipment fits, laundry room workers may have to get creative when it comes to moving around in the space. These constraints make the laundry’s general operating approach “cumbersome on its finest day and ridiculous on a regular day,” Lazarre says. Barrier walls meant to separate the wash side of the laundry from the dry side—an important design element for fire prevention purposes—present challenges for anyone who needs to traverse the labyrinth of machinery to get close to a piece of equipment.
Lazarre says he’s been a part of maintenance tasks “where we had to remove a catwalk to crawl into a 1-foot-wide gap to work on something at the floor, and the catwalk was at 3 or 4 feet in the air. So it’s literally [like] you’re crawling into a crack in order to lay on your stomach to work on a component.”
The linens processed onboard a cruise ship are much like those found in a typical resort property, according to Lazarre, but the difference is that come turnaround day, when all the guests leave, the laundry will experience a large influx of linen, as all items are stripped from the beds and processed before the next voyage. Towels from the pools, along with napkins and table linen from the restaurants, are also rounded up and processed.
When it comes to keeping equipment running to ensure smooth processing of these linens, having spare parts on hand is absolutely essential, Lazarre says, as the logistics of getting spare parts when needed can be more complicated than most land-based OPL managers can begin to imagine. Items are most easily acquired when a ship gets to its home port, which may not happen very often.
“So, a spare part that is needed for a piece of laundry equipment—flatwork feeder/folder, ironer, etc.—[this] could be three months in transit sitting in a warehouse, being loaded on a container, being shipped by container ship to a foreign port, offloaded, delivered to the port and then unloaded onto a cruise ship,” Lazarre explains.
For this reason, most cruise ships have an abundance of spare parts onboard, he says, but adds that “anyone who knows enough about electronics and mechanics and electrical components knows it’s always going to be something that you don’t have that will happen to break today.”
This lack of a readily available support system, among other restrictions, makes for a unique culture that invades the entire ship, according to Lazarre. “There’s a ship mentality, and they all possess it,” he says of cruise ship employees. “They will work around any obstacle. But it’s like watching people build pyramids by hand—it would astonish most people in a land-based laundry.”
Because fire prevention is always on the mind of staff members, special efforts are made to reduce lint. Lazarre says cracks and crevices behind panels that can accumulate lint are cleaned by housekeeping staff often, and that ships have invested in other features to cut down on lint, such as structural beams dressed in stainless steel panels.
“Fire prevention on a ship is of the highest priority,” he says. And when it comes to the kind of equipment best suited to the environment, Lazarre says that cruise ships that have the available space might consider a continuous batch washer system, which could include a continuous washer, press or extractor of some sort, a shuttle, dryers and conveyors to transport linen. Conveyors are important because, in many cases, space doesn’t allow for manual movement.
“You have to use conveyors to move stuff because it’s just too crammed up to get a body behind it to do it any other way,” he says.
SPAS, SALONS, ATHLETIC FACILITIES: HAIR, WEAR AND TEAR
Though spas, salons and athletic facilities all cater to people’s desire for self-improvement, Dan Goldman, senior regional business development manager at Laundrylux, says each has different processing requirements due to divergent goals at the heart of those businesses.
A spa, for instance, probably won’t need an industrial-strength machine, but will need a piece of equipment more durable and long-lasting than a regular home appliance. Goldman says one type of washer from Wascomat (distributed by Laundrylux) is popular with spas because of its “Pump Guard,” which keeps the equipment’s pump from getting clogged when items like safety pins and bra underwires end up in the wash. This feature helps salons, too, which often deal with an abundance of hair in the washer, another drain-clogging item.
Goldman says the quality of towels at a spa or an athletic facility is of utmost importance to clients. At a salon, towels are stained with hair dye but reused many times, so extending linen life is the highest priority for this kind of business. At athletic facilities, operating on a 24-hour schedule has resulted in the need for a steady supply of clean towels at all hours of the day and night, according to Goldman.
“And the last thing [customers] want after a strenuous workout is not to have clean, fresh-smelling towels and, of course, washcloths,” he says. Some of the fitness centers that provide massage services will need fresh sheets and pillowcases, too. Ultra-high-speed extraction can help get the towels dryer in shorter amounts of time, allowing for quicker production, Goldman says. He adds that machinery with a gravity drain, which allows debris to empty through a floor drain, means nothing will get caught in the pump, and is well-suited for fitness centers as it rapidly removes water in the load and readies it for a quick dry.
Besides quality and availability, extending linen life for this type of niche laundry is also important, and can mean examining the doses of chemicals used in loads.
“What has happened in the past … is the tensile strength loss [for linens] has been exacerbated in fitness centers, because they tend to use way too much bleach to get everything bright and white,” Goldman says. When operators make sure they’re not using too much bleach, they cut back on the chance of linens tearing and ripping easily. Chemical doses and water levels can be adjusted based on the weight of the laundry in the washer through a feature called SmartDosing, Goldman says.
And when it comes time to dry, leaving just a touch of moisture in linens helps operators keep from over-drying them, which can result in lint and other fire hazards, he says.
“What gyms … are generally doing is leaving [the moisture] at 2%,” Goldman comments. “At 2%, you can’t even feel moisture, but there’s enough moisture in there to cut down on the biggest enemy a laundry has: static. And static’s best friend is lint.”
Check back Thursday for the conclusion!
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].