[Colin Day]

Some very good points Mr Dawg...

I now have 20 reasons why I SHOULD own a TM....



























And a 100 why I SHOULDN'T....

[Billy Russell]

I'm with simon on this, tm all the way!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just easier!!!!!! but some people prefer portables, fair enough, i have both, wouldn't life be boring if we we're all the same!!!!!!!! 

[Simon Gerrard]

I love portables, especially when my competitors keep using them. I even have a couple of my own to lend them when their's breakbrown.

[AshWhite]

I love I even have a couple of my own to lend them when their's breakbrown.

Come on Simon, you're making this too easy now..

 

Ash

[jon barnes]

personally we couldnt do the level of work with a portable we do with our TM. we had a bane trcukmount before our phoenix and we can fit in between 1 and 2 more a day and still be home earlier. cant remember last time access was an issue but i can think of at least a dozen cases in the last couple of years where i  wouldnt of been able to do the job with an electric machine because of lack of power or pooe wiring. As to the extra cost surely you can justify extra ££ to the customer as your not using their electricty or hot water?

[Thackley Cleaning Services]

mate... will you please explain exactly what makes a truck mount faster than a top of the range portable cleaner ?

Do you guys cut corners and miss out steps like pre-vaccing, or pre-spraying ?

Does the extra power of the machine mean that you make less passes ?

whats so effin great about a truckmount ?

thanks

[jon barnes]

we havent changed our orgnisation much  but we certainly make fewer passes than we used to setting up/packing up is quicker than it used to be generally have to spend less time spotting as more dirt is flushed out this maybe different for others but these are some of the differences we've found 

[Billy Russell]

Thackley,(sorry don't know your first name)

Those we're the same questions i asked, i went truckmounted in january this year, but before i did i went out for a day with one of the guy's off here who's truckmounted and it opened my eyes to a whole new world  and at the time i was using one of the top of the range 3 vac portables! i cannot recommend enough going out with a trucky!!!!!!!!!!!!

Regards

Billy IRONMAN Russell 

[Jim_77]

How is this a "fact"? Where's the proof? Personaly I think this is a myth. Sure you save some time not filling buckets and emptying but enough time saved to add 2 or 3 jobs on a day??

I did two jobs today.  Both were 3-storey houses, cleaned all the way through, one furnished the other empty.  Probably 1800ft² of carpet plus 4 flights of stairs in total.

Total work time roughly 5 hours.... which included a chat over a cup of tea, playing with a dog for 5 minutes, trying to help the poor decorator fix a leaky pipe at the EOT plus about a 10 minute ciggy break cos I was playing with my iPhone.  Basically IO was taking my time and I could have chopped it down to 4 hours if I wasn't screwing around.

If I'd been doing that with portable machines I'd still be there now!

Thackley, a TM doesn't make you lazy or negligent in your cleaning, quite the opposite.  It teaches you the most important place in your cleaning system to put all of your effort into.  I laugh at myself when I think of all the time over the years I've wasted with a vacuum cleaner in my hand

Unless a carpet 'looks' perfectly clean, pre-spraying is always a must in my opinion.  Very very few carpets I extract just with the chem in the rinse water (have founds solutions SPM to be very good for that purpose though)

[Neil Williams]

If I'd been doing that with portable machines I'd still be there now!

Your too late Jim.
Marks been telling us for some time how he does 3 storey town houses in 2 to 2.5 for some time......and with a porty

[Warren Aldridge]

I'm going into my 12th month of trade in Sep and so starting to get the repeat business calls coming in.
I did a job yesterday which I did in my 2nd month. first time around I did it with a triple vac, took almost 6 hours. I appreciate part of that was to being new.

Yesterday I did it with my TM in 1.5 hours. I reckon it would have taken an extra hour with my triple vac so still halved.

But as I get on with my TM after 3 months now its taken time to get the confidence in it to do the leg work. The last few jobs I've cut down heavily on the agitation and spotting pre rinse. Where I would spend an hour agitating with an orbitor and spotting until clean I would use the TM like a glorified porty. Now I quickly run through the agitation and spot after rinse, or while rinsing. I run at 400 psi mostly and the TM batters dirty sections and still keeps the dry time minimal. Makes a huge difference in time and the results are exactly the same.

[Simon Gerrard]

Years ago, ok, decades ago, we used to do a regular job in a pub. With a combination system (rotary scrubbing with portable hwse) took 7 hours overnight. Then we got our first TM so dropped the combination cleaning to just prespray and wand with TM. Job time dropped to 3 hours. Then we got an rx20, job time dropped to 1 hour 50 minutes.
Regardless of whether a TM does a better job, there is no doubt that they are a lot more efficient and can cover a lot more work than a portable system and that is what makes them such an attractive proposition.
Simon

[Colin Day]

When I first started up, the school I do took me 2 weeks to clean with a porty. 3 years on and I do the same area in 3-4 days..... What's changed...? My time management mainly, because I still use a porty along with my OP machine....

Time management is key in carpet cleaning, as indeed it is with any form of service where time is money... But if I really got to a point where I find I really can't be bothered with bucket lugging, I'll buy a TM and boast as much as I can about owning one.....

[Jamie Pearson]

For our carpet cleaning division a truck mount is absolutely useless due to most work being carpet tile and Hi-rise office installations.

I only have 1 definate job per year where it would save us time. It's for our only domestic carpet cleaning customer.

We have considered one for our hard floor maintenance work but feel that high pressure/spinner type tools aren't great for natural stone and a truck is just too noisy to work on the poolside contracts we have due to a high portion of them being at hotels and done at night. We use a Alltec/Hydroforce Olympus on these.

[clarkson]

 hi
 iam coming to the conclusion that if you are a dedicated carpet cleaner, who has built up a round of customers and is inundated with work tm starts to make sense.

 however for a start up or a bolt on like me where it is another string to my bow a new style porty will do
 if we get busier and faster and start to struggle to cope with work i could upgrade.

 cheers

 john

[neil kellett]

The thing with doing carpets as a bolt on is having to load up every time from scratch every time the dog rings. You can't with your damp van leave the gear on it, especially the electric portable. So you need to wheel it out, load it up, get your vac, , envirodri (or whatever you use for agitation) all of the wands, chems, attachments, sprayers, tools your air mover maybe and your bag of tricks. And you only need to forget one thing, as you do, to throw a spanner in. The lads using the Prowlers don't have that problem. They don't need to pre vac for starters coz of the heat they're getting. They don't need to empty the waste tank, coz it emptys as it sucks. They don't need to plug the vac side in downstairs and then the heater side in upstairs so as not to trip the switch. They mightened even need a turbo dryer as the sheer power would nearly leave them dry.

Its like the van mounted wc system, the quicker I can get water onto the glass the better. As opposed to the trollie dollies. I hate bringing the Advance into the customers home, its too noisy and awkward. I hate having to load it back into the van and then off back into the shed. I'm saving for a prowler.

[Colin Day]

I concur that the Advance is a pain getting in and out of the van. It's a heavy, albeit well built bit of kit...

[Thackley Cleaning Services]

How is this a "fact"? Where's the proof? Personaly I think this is a myth. Sure you save some time not filling buckets and emptying but enough time saved to add 2 or 3 jobs on a day??

I did two jobs today.  Both were 3-storey houses, cleaned all the way through, one furnished the other empty.  Probably 1800ft² of carpet plus 4 flights of stairs in total.

Total work time roughly 5 hours.... which included a chat over a cup of tea, playing with a dog for 5 minutes, trying to help the poor decorator fix a leaky pipe at the EOT plus about a 10 minute ciggy break cos I was playing with my iPhone.  Basically IO was taking my time and I could have chopped it down to 4 hours if I wasn't screwing around.

If I'd been doing that with portable machines I'd still be there now!

Thackley, a TM doesn't make you lazy or negligent in your cleaning, quite the opposite.  It teaches you the most important place in your cleaning system to put all of your effort into.  I laugh at myself when I think of all the time over the years I've wasted with a vacuum cleaner in my hand

Unless a carpet 'looks' perfectly clean, pre-spraying is always a must in my opinion.  Very very few carpets I extract just with the chem in the rinse water (have founds solutions SPM to be very good for that purpose though)

thanks for the reply mate.

so you dont vac but still pre-spray and agitate yet still manage to shave off ridiculous amounts of working time.

So the TM just needs less passes to achieve max results.  Instead of going over areas twice, you are doing it once and its done.  I can see where that would save a lot of time over a portable.

[Jim_77]

That's one thing, not only less passes but quicker passes too. The actual extraction part of a job must be at least 3 times the speed of a standard portable (maybe the gap with a top end portable is less).  Thats presuming you're going slow enough with the porty to flush properly

Add to that the setup time: with a well organised TM setup you can back onto a drive, pull off 50ft of hose from the reel and have a whole empty house pre-sprayed within 10 mins

[clarkson]

The thing with doing carpets as a bolt on is having to load up every time from scratch every time the dog rings. You can't with your damp van leave the gear on it, especially the electric portable. So you need to wheel it out, load it up, get your vac, , envirodri (or whatever you use for agitation) all of the wands, chems, attachments, sprayers, tools your air mover maybe and your bag of tricks. And you only need to forget one thing, as you do, to throw a spanner in. The lads using the Prowlers don't have that problem. They don't need to pre vac for starters coz of the heat they're getting. They don't need to empty the waste tank, coz it emptys as it sucks. They don't need to plug the vac side in downstairs and then the heater side in upstairs so as not to trip the switch. They mightened even need a turbo dryer as the sheer power would nearly leave them dry.


i totally agree i have got it  down pat though have all the bits and bobs in plastic boxes so its machine hose wand boxes. still a pain though.

you think thats bad we do pressure washing as well. to machines several lances a whirlaway ibc tank hoses. it looks like we are a planning a small war when we load up.

My point was if you arent carpet cleaning all day everyday a tm in a dedicated van is an expensive piece of kit to have parked up.

john