When thinking about the housekeeping requirements for your company it is easy to only look at eye level and consider it clean. Your industrial cleaning routine might be to sweep the floors and blow dust off any machinery, making it appear clean at first glance. However, there is an area that is often overlooked when it comes to industrial cleaning, and it has the potential to cause severe problems later on.
This forgotten about area is the ceiling above your head, full of rafters, pipes and ductwork. Dirt and dust travels through the air and lands on these high surfaces, where they accumulate quickly. Since these areas are out of reach and out of sight they don’t get regularly cleaned or disturbed, and the industrial dust on the ceiling increases while the rest of your building appears clean.
While it may seem that as long as that ceiling dust stays up there it’s not hurting anything, it is actually causing numerous problems within the building.
First, that dust will periodically fall down onto the machinery or products on the floor, which can damage the industrial machinery or cause products to be contaminated and have quality defects. It will also fall into the air that your employees are breathing, causing illnesses and lower work efficiency. The ceiling acts like a filter for your building, and if this filter isn’t cleaned it causes the building air to be low quality. These accumulations are also prime areas for dangerous mold and bacteria to grow, causing even more health risks to anyone inside the building.
If that isn’t enough, this rafter and ceiling dust can be made of combustible dust which can act like a bomb. What typically happens is that a small fire or explosion happens with ground level dust, but the shockwaves from this disrupt the ceiling dust, which falls down and creates a dust cloud over the whole building. This second, much larger, cloud of dust then ignites and explodes. Adding the ceilings and rafters to your list of industrial cleaning responsibilities helps to ensure that all of these risks are resolved.
Hughes Environmental has the tools and ability to clean these high surfaces, and our technicians have all completed OSHA training, including fall protection training, and safety will be our top priority. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you.
