What happens in a decontamination?

We’ve been decontaminating healthcare centres, depots and mailrooms and when lockdown measures gradually relax, rapid decontamination of offices and workplaces will become part of everyday normality for many of us.

You’ll need to make sure you’re working with a cleaning company who knows what they’re doing – you’ll find a few cowboys along the way, charging peanuts for a half-finished job so it’s important that you know what should be happening during a decontamination.

To help, I’ve shared some behind-the-scenes insight into what to expect based on what we’ve found works. At the moment there are two main ways of doing this, depending on the location:

Fogging

The team arrive onsite, dressed in their protective gear which includes a full suit, goggles, mask and gloves. The first thing they will do is identify a place for their ‘safe zone’, somewhere they can immediately decontaminate that will be able to safely house all the kit during our visit. We use specialist chemicals that have the European standard for testing and evaluating viricidal activity in the medical area (EN 14476) which has been approved by Public Health England for the treatment of COVID-19. Using fogging machines, the product will atomise in the air so that it touches every surface very effectively.

With these machines, our team will systematically work through the building, paying particular attention to the most used areas. If there has been a confirmed case of COVID-19 on the premises, then the areas used by the infected individual will be thoroughly decontaminated.

Once this process is complete, the team will remove their kit at the safe zone and bag it for hazardous waste. This is really important to prevent any further contamination. Two hours later and you and your employees will be able to enter the building.

Electrostatic Spraying and Disinfecting

In some places, it is easier to use a backpack, rather than a fogging machine. Take transport hubs or outside areas –there might not be easy access to electricity points which are needed to power the fogging machines. That’s why we have invested in specialist backpacks, which means our team can easily spray the disinfectant product ‘on the go’.

Electrostatic disinfecting (electrostatic cleaning) is a touchless application of chemicals used after janitorial services to efficiently and evenly coat surfaces with a disinfecting solution. The electrostatic applicator applies a negative charge to the disinfecting solution as it leaves the application tool. Since charged molecules repel each other, they create a more evenly distributed disinfectant application, which is attracted to the applied surface, thereby creating 360-degrees of coverage. These charged particles create a web of disinfectant over the applied surfaces with a micron size between 40 to 110 microns. This service is particularly important because germs and bacteria hide in hard-to-reach areas, which are reached during an electrostatic disinfecting service.

We will dispose of all our materials in hazardous waste at the end. With spraying you can re-enter the premises as soon as the area is dry, which takes around 20 to 30 minutes.

The time it takes to do each process completely depends on the area required for decontamination. It can take as little as 20 minutes to do an entrance to a building, or it can take a few hours to systematically decontaminate an entire office complex. When this happens, our team can work through the night to do it to avoid too much disruption to the daytime operations of the office. Whatever the case, it’s important to do it right - if the job isn’t done properly then there’s a lot at stake.

I hope this helps provide a bit of context; if you have any questions then please drop me a line and I’d be happy to help.