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| Restoring Textile Using Ozone by Susan Capparelle If a fire breaks out in your nursing home or hospital – how would you get the smell of smoke out of sheets, towels, curtains, tablecloths and resident clothing and personal effects? Sure, detergents work, but some odors can be persistent. And sometimes goods can be damaged by the amount of detergent that needs to be used. Larry Long, owner of Long Cleaners, Inc. holds a franchise for Certified Restoration Drycleaning Network of Southwest Ohio (CRDN) in Miamisburg, Ohio. CRDN is an International Network of franchised Textile Restoration Cleaners. So he knows about linen / goods restoration. After all, its his job to remove all textiles from a facility as a result of fire, smoke, furnace puff back or any atmospheric problem – and return those textiles looking and smelling fresh and clean. “We remove all the textiles, clean out the draws, closets, beddings, linens and drapery,” he says. “After bringing the goods to my plant we determine if they need to be processed via drycleaning or laundry methods.” To date he says, there’s a 70 / 30 split on the restoration of soft goods and textiles damaged by smoke, water, soot and/or odors due to fire or flood. Seventy percent of damaged goods respond well to laundering, 30 percent Until last year, CRDN's laundry restoration process consisted of washing with extended cycles, using various chemical formulas, according to Long. "It was a lengthy process. As one formula failed you tried another and then another and each processing time we consumed large amounts of supplies and water, usually hot water," said Long. Half of what the company washed required at least two washings and many times three washings due to the remaining odor. After being introduced to the process of Ozone at Clean ’05, Long decided to further investigate the possibilities and applications in his facility. “We certainly had our reservations and explored it,” he says. “We did some background research and decided to test the water by bringing in one unit.” That one unit grew to three more 60-lb. Edro machines.
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Today, there are four custom built Edro ozone washers at Long’s facility. “They have not only brought the company significant savings but terrific product results as well,” he says. "We had the first custom unit installed in mid October 2005 and its performance was so outstanding and beyond our expectations that it very quickly became the one and only washer that the department wanted to use." Long’s custom built machine consists has an extra ozone power chamber – so there are three chambers instead of the standard two. That is so that there would always be adequate ozone in reserve to add to the wash formula. Washing is now a simple one pass, says Long. There’s a couple of cold rinses, a mild detergent added, a couple more rinses, a sour rinse if needed, a softener rinse, then extract, he says. "With each fill ozone is injected into the water supply and every load that is removed now smells fresh and pleasant," said Long. And there have been significant savings. CRDN has cut back on their chemical additives by 40% and because ozone uses cold water they have saved on their natural gas bills. The CRDN plant site building is 15,000 square feet and between the retail business and the restoration side the plant processes on average 6,000 lbs plus per week according to Long. "We utilize four 60-lb Edro Dynawash Ozone washers, one 50-lb Uniwash Washer, four Daewoo 18-lb top load washers, five 30-pound stacked Dexter dryers, two 30-lb. ACD stacked dryers and a 50-lb Cissell dryer,' said Long. “For finishing things like tablecloths we have a 110-inch Ajax flat press.” As part of their marketing strategy CRDN gives a lot of tours through their plant to contractors and insurance adjusters. Because they are proud of their operation and want to show it off, Long asked the machine’s manufacturer, Edro, to put a Plexiglas window in the area of the ozone chambers so that as people tour the facility they can view the chambers and learn more about the ozone process. "It's kind of a "Gee Whiz" factor that you can include into a tour and believe me there aren't many of those in our industry," said Long. “And for us, we don’t use chemicals, we use our standard formula and cool or cold water. So we’ve cut down on chemicals and the number of rinses and reduced water usage. It’s just working splendidly.”
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