When looking for a cleaning service to handle your commercial cleaning needs, it might feel like you've entered a whole new country with all these cleaning industry terms and jargon. So how do you know what kind of cleaning you need and whether a cleaning service can handle your commercial cleaning?
At TNT Group Janitorial + Building Solutions, we want to help you get the clean you need. So we've put together the ultimate cleaning terms glossary for the cleaning industry so you know exactly what you're looking at.
Cleaning Industry Terms
Antibacterial
This is a common one we see all the time. It refers to using processes, including tools or products, that kill or slow the growth of bacteria. However, it's important to know that these formulas are ineffective against viruses.
Decontamination: another one of the famous cleaning industry terms
When professional cleaning services like TNT Group Janitorial + Building Solutions perform decontamination, we reduce or remove microorganisms or dangerous substances. This can include biohazardous material and infectious viruses. Decontamination is crucial for spaces with biohazardous materials like blood or other substances. This is because it ensures that everyone entering the area afterward stays safe.
Decontamination processes can include physical means like cleaning, disinfecting, and sterilizations or using chemical neutralization methods.
Deep Cleaning
Although there’s no hard and fast standard for what constitutes a deep clean, it usually refers to a significant improvement in the cleaning result. Cleaning is the usual, everyday or common cleaning you would do in your home or office to keep it clean. But deep cleaning is a step beyond that. It reaches out to the areas that don't receive cleaning as often or sometimes simply doing a more effective job in the areas that you do clean. When used by professional cleaning services, it usually refers to things like disinfecting with high-powered tools or products.
Disinfect
This is where antibacterial cleaners deal with bacteria, disinfect products, and process target pathogens. The best disinfecting products kill 99.999% of what they’re targeting, but it’s important to note that these products are only truly effective against the pathogens they target directly. Disinfecting should happen after cleaning, and it’s important to ensure that disinfectants spend their full dwell time on the surface to be entirely effective.
Covid-19 Disinfecting Services
Something you’ll see a lot with professional cleaning services, such as TNT Group Janitorial + Building Solutions, is disinfecting services around Covid-19 specifically. This is because disinfectant is most effective when it targets a specific pathogen. So when services are advertised as Covid-19 disinfecting, they target Covid-19 specifically with their products and tools.
Dwell Time
Dwell time is the specific length of time a disinfectant must remain in contact with a surface to ensure it kills 99.999% of pathogens. This is a crucial thing to know and you will see on the label of the disinfectant. Without observing proper dwell times, disinfectant isn’t guaranteed to be effective. Some disinfectants have dwell times of a minute or less, although most are 4-10 minutes. That’s why methods like spraying and wiping immediately aren't always effective. You should leave disinfectant to dwell for several minutes, per the labels.
Sanitize
This term has been used interchangeably with others on this list a lot in the past few years. The important thing about sanitization is that it merely reduces germs and microorganisms. It's the process of lowering specific and targeted germs by 99.9% in 30 seconds or less. Sanitization can’t kill viruses or fungi.
Get Your Cleaning Industry Terms Straight in Nashville and Davidson County
With all these terms that mean similar but ultimately different things, it's normal to get them confused. However, knowing the difference between several terms and understanding how they affect your different cleaning needs can ensure you get the right clean for your office space.
TNT Group Janitorial + Building Solutions is happy to be your friendly and easy-to-understand professional cleaning service in Nashville and Davidson County. For more information about cleaning and navigating it, visit our website here.
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