Industrial & Specialty Cleaning near you

The label covers a wide range of unrelated jobs. Being specific about which one you have is the fastest way to get comparable bids, because the equipment and the qualifications differ completely between them.

Confined space entry is where this trade kills people, and the federal standard is precise about what one is. OSHA defines a confined space as a space large enough and so configured that an employee can bodily enter and perform assigned work, that has limited or restricted means for entry or exit, and that is not designed for continuous employee occupancy, giving tanks, vessels, silos, storage bins, hoppers, vaults and pits as examples. It becomes a permit-required confined space if it contains or has the potential to contain a hazardous atmosphere, contains material with the potential to engulf an entrant, has an internal configuration in which an entrant could be trapped or asphyxiated, or contains any other recognized serious safety or health hazard.

The duties follow from that. The employer must evaluate the workplace to determine whether any spaces are permit-required confined spaces, and where employees will enter them, must develop and implement a written permit space program that complies with the standard and make it available for inspection by employees and their representatives. If a contractor proposes to send someone into a tank, pit or vault on your property, ask to see that written program and ask how atmospheric testing, attendants and rescue are arranged.

Respirators carry their own requirements. Where they are necessary to protect employee health, OSHA requires the employer to establish and implement a written respiratory protection program with worksite-specific procedures, to provide a medical evaluation to determine an employee's ability to use a respirator before that employee is fit tested or required to use one, and to ensure that employees using tight-fitting facepieces pass a qualitative or quantitative fit test before initial use, when a different facepiece is used, and at least annually thereafter. A crew pulling dust masks out of a box for a job that plainly needs respirators is telling you how the rest of the work will be done.

Specialty cleaning uses products that are nothing like household cleaners: strong alkalis, acids, solvents and degreasers chosen because the job needs them. OSHA's hazard communication standard exists to ensure that the hazards of all chemicals produced or imported are classified and that information about those hazards is transmitted to employers and employees. It requires safety data sheets in a standard 16-section format to be readily accessible during each work shift to employees in their work areas, requires shipped containers to be labeled with the product identifier, a signal word of Danger or Warning, hazard statements, pictograms and precautionary statements, and requires training at initial assignment and whenever a new chemical hazard is introduced.

For a property owner, this is a document you can simply ask for. Request the safety data sheets for everything that will be used in your building before the job, and read the sections on ventilation requirements, incompatible materials and what surfaces the product should not contact. It answers practical questions that otherwise become disputes: whether the building has to be unoccupied, how long before people can return, whether the HVAC system should be shut down or isolated, and what the product will do to the floor finish, the fixtures or the equipment next to the work.

Industrial cleaning produces waste that is frequently more regulated than anything else on the job. EPA sorts hazardous waste generators into three categories by monthly volume: very small quantity generators, which generate 100 kilograms or less per month of hazardous waste or one kilogram or less per month of acutely hazardous waste; small quantity generators, which generate more than 100 kilograms but less than 1,000 kilograms per month; and large quantity generators, which generate 1,000 kilograms per month or more of hazardous waste or more than one kilogram per month of acutely hazardous waste. Which category applies determines the obligations that come with it.

The question to settle in writing before work begins is who is named as the generator of any hazardous waste produced on your property, where the waste is going, and what documentation you will receive. Ask the same about the water: wash water from degreasing a shop floor or cleaning equipment is not rain, and EPA's NPDES stormwater program regulates discharges from municipal separate storm sewer systems, construction activities and industrial activities, with permitted municipalities implementing stormwater management programs describing the practices they use to minimize the discharge of pollutants from the system. Your city's stormwater or pretreatment office has a position on what may go to a storm drain and what may go to the sanitary sewer, and a competent contractor already has that conversation in their process.

These bids differ because the scope differs, and the scope is rarely obvious from the outside. What moves the price is the area and condition, how heavy and how bonded the residue is, the equipment required, whether confined space entry, lockout or fall protection apply, how much protection has to be built around what is not being cleaned, whether the space must be unoccupied and whether the work is out of hours, the volume and classification of waste and how it must be disposed of, and how the finished result will be judged. Post-construction jobs in particular move on the quality of the builder's own cleanup, which is impossible to price without looking.

LokalMatch takes care of the first step. You describe the job once: what the space is, what is on the surfaces, roughly how large it is, whether it is occupied, and any deadline such as a handover, an inspection or a reopening. Contractors serving your area who do this kind of work receive the request, and the ones interested contact you directly. Pros pay for the requests they receive, and there is no charge to use the service. LokalMatch does not perform cleaning, does not set prices, and does not vet, rank or recommend any contractor, so verifying insurance, the written method and the waste plan is your part.