Finding ways to save costs and increase profits is critical for every company’s success. Striking a balance between offering excellent customer service and remaining financially viable is a much more difficult issue for hotels than many outsiders imagine.
However, there is one service in particular that may use some work. Laundry is one service that may make or break a guest’s hotel stay. Everything from the freshness of the bedding to the softness and cleanliness of the towels affects a guest’s perception of his or her hotel stay, and all of these factors are dependent on your laundry’s performance.
Despite the importance of laundry to a hotel’s continuous functioning, even the most experienced hoteliers make a number of typical blunders. These errors might result in unnecessarily high operational costs, guest loss, and delayed or ineffective service.
Here’s a rundown of the problems with hotel laundry equipment:
#1. Overloading Laundry Machines
This is the most common blunder committed by both professional washing services and ordinary folks. The temptation with huge, industrial-size laundry machines is to fill them to capacity rather than the suggested capacity.
When a laundry machine is overloaded, it is unable to equally distribute detergent throughout the load or properly agitate materials, resulting in partial cleaning cycles and soil remaining in linens and towels.
Not only that, but working at full capacity puts extra strain on the machinery, causing them to break down sooner. As a result, the cost of laundry machine repair and/or replacement rises.
#2. Under-loading Laundry Machine
When a manager is concerned about overburdening their machines, they may make the opposite mistake of not loading enough laundry into them prior to usage. This can be a huge waste of time. With a half-load, a normal laundry machine uses the same amount of water and electricity as with a full load.
Half-loads waste not just water but also the time of laundry employees for in-house laundry operations. This method reduces the amount of laundry that can be processed per day by half. So, if your laundry business is at full capacity with full loads, running half loads could mean falling behind on guest requirements like bedding linens and towels.
#3. Not Cleaning Out Washing Machines
This is a common blunder made by inexperienced hotel owners and managers. After all, why would a system that is supposed to clean itself need to be cleaned?
The truth is that not all water will exit the machine between loads. A laundry washing machine will have a tiny amount of standing water in it at the end of the day. This water can stagnate if left to rest overnight, causing unpleasant odors to adhere to garments laundered in that machine.
To combat this issue, machines should be cleaned at the end of the day so that water caught in the machine’s drum does not grow stagnant. This will assist in maintaining machine efficiency.
#4. Using too much chemicals
Excessive chemical use, beyond what is required to complete the task, does little to increase the quality of fabric care and cleaning. Using too much detergent or other chemicals, on the other hand, can promote premature fabric wear.
Color bleed can be aided by too much chemical in a washing cycle, leading materials to lose their vibrant, new appearance. Worse, if lighter-colored clothes are washed alongside darker-colored fabrics, errant dye may penetrate into the lighter-colored fabrics, destroying their appearance.
The simplest approach to avoid this issue is to calculate your chemical usage per load based on the amount advised by the detergent manufacturer for your load size and machine type.
#5. Not Monitoring Monthly Utilities and Chemical Use
The exact utility usage of a hotel’s in-house washing service is unknown to many hoteliers. It can be difficult to design an efficient plan for optimizing your laundry operations without some form of trustworthy monitoring of how much water, electricity, and chemicals are actually utilized on a regular basis.
The monthly utility bill may give you an idea of how much water your hotel consumes, but it only measures the overall amount of water running through your building. It’s possible that your excessive utility expenditures are due to your laundry operation, or that the leaky faucet in room 2E is to blame.
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#6. Failing to Adjust Machine Settings for Specific Fabrics
Setting the machines for the type of clothes being cleaned is sometimes missed when laundry staff is racing from one wash load to the next. Using the same wash cycle for huge, bulky delicates as you would for thick, cottony towels that need to be sanitized in high heat and powerful chemicals might result in excessive wear and strain.
Putting heavy-soil goods through a delicate cycle, on the other hand, may result in them not being clean enough to utilize for guests, necessitating a second wash cycle. Not only does this cause additional wear and tear on clothing, but it also wastes water, electricity, and chemicals.
#7 Sticking with the Same Old, Inefficient Machines
For a long time, there was no motivation to modernize your in-house washing equipment if the existing equipment was still functional. For nearly 60 years, there has been little significant innovation in commercial laundry machine design, making upgrades a waste of money.
Hotel laundry’s future has shifted. With the launch of Hydrofinity’s breakthrough low-water laundry systems, there has now been enough of a change in the way laundry is processed to warrant serious consideration of updating laundry systems.
These groundbreaking new commercial washing machines deliver greater fabric care as well as significant operating cost advantages, with water utility savings of 80%, half the chemical use, and less reliance on heating utilities for cleaning.
Contact Henson Laundry!
If you want to learn more about our equipment maintenance services, get in touch with Henson Laundry. Our experts can answer all your questions and help you every step of the way.
