subject: The Technologies And Equipment Used For Commercial Laundries [print this page] Commercial laundry operations comprise a range of operations that include everything from on-premise laundries at commercial establishments to different institutions such as nursing homes, athletic facilities, hospitals, laundry homes and even prisons. Apartment laundry rooms and Laundromats are also classified and grouped in this category as they use specialised commercial laundry equipment. The industrial laundries extend diverse services for people at on-premise locations and also provide linen, uniform and diaper services.
Clothes washing equipment comprises:
Front loading machines
Tunnel washers
Top Loading equipments
The methods that are eventually used as a substitute for perchloroethylene dry-cleaning operations comprise:
Silicon based compounds
Wet cleaning process that is similar to front loading washers
Supercritical carbon-dioxide technologies
The use of efficient equipments, ozone systems and water recycling methods helps to reduce the rate of water consumption by the regular laundries. When it comes to dry-cleaning operations, the use of silicon and carbon-dioxide based technologies completely eliminate the use of water when compared to the alternative method of wet cleaning.
Multi-family and coin-operated laundries have made use of clothes washers that are quite similar to the ones used for domestic laundry purposes. Over the years, soft mount and top load washers have more or less occupied a sizable section of the market. It is necessary that these machines achieve a WF or water factor of 9.5 gallons or even less per cubic foot of washer capacity and a MEF or modified energy factor of 1.26.
On the basis of the information procured from five major manufacturers in the field of laundry equipments, it is apparent that a number of Laundromats prefer using hard-mount laundry equipment and therefore are opting for the installation of multi-load capacity washers. The capacity of such washers can even go beyond 80 pounds per wash when compared to 20 pounds in case of the conventional washing equipment.
The standards set by the industry for single load hard-mount equipment and multi load equipment need to be followed diligently by laundry equipment suppliersand manufacturers. The multi load equipment is in fact the same as the ones used by industrial laundries and commercial on-premise laundries. The multi-load equipment is equipped with a wide range of wash cycles and wash settings to meet the varied washing requirements. The equipment provider or manufacturer must ensure that the controls are preset in order to meet the washing requirement. This needs to be done before installation in order to avoid excessive use of water.
The OPL or on-premise laundries utilise washer extractors which are quite similar to the multi-load equipment that are installed in Laundromats except for the fact that they are much bigger in size and are devoid of the coin-boxes. The load capacity of the washers ranges from 30 pounds to 800 pounds. These washers are designed in a way that they can clean everything from bedding to hotel towels, from heavily stained items in commercial kitchens to nursing homes apart from ensuring proper cleaning of huge piles of regular washables.
