Project Safety Overview

Man­ag­ing projects can be a very dan­ger­ous ele­ment of the work­place. This video high­lights some major projects and how to use best prac­tices and PPE in order to enhance safe­ty dur­ing projects.

Video Tran­script:

Hal­ston:

Budd Group team, wel­come. This month we’re going to do some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent for our safe­ty train­ing videos. That is because of what you guys are doing dur­ing this next month is going to be a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent. We’re going to be doing some project work. A lot of you work at accounts that are asso­ci­at­ed with schools. What that means is the teach­ers are out, the stu­dents are out, and we’re going to be clean­ing floor, scrub­bing car­pets, doing some pres­sure wash and mov­ing a lot of fur­ni­ture. I brought in our res­i­dent project work expert, Justin Schoen­berg­er, and he’s going to talk us through how to do some of these projects and do them safely.

Hal­ston:

The first thing we want­ed to talk about is how to move fur­ni­ture cor­rect­ly and lift things prop­er­ly. Because when the sum­mer comes, inevitably we have a lot of peo­ple pulling backs and hurt­ing shoul­ders because they’re lift­ing stuff they should­n’t be or they’re doing it the wrong way. One of the things that we see is peo­ple actu­al­ly just lift­ing trash bags incor­rect­ly. For instance, we have a lot of peo­ple that just come over and they just think they’re going to snatch this thing up. What in the world? Man, this thing’s heavy. What do you think is in here?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Hal­ston, I’d be will­ing to bet there’s some books in there.

Hal­ston:

Books?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

It’s the end of the school year and a lot of teach­ers are just throw­ing things away, plus genius, they just hap­pened to be sit­ting here.

Hal­ston:

Oh my good­ness. You’re right. Yeah. Teach­ers do that all the time. They don’t think a lot about what we’re throw­ing away and lift­ing. So it’s impor­tant if you’re going to lift some­thing like this to make sure you just take a sec­ond and tug on a lit­tle bit, fig­ure out how heavy it’s going to be, and then maybe Justin will show us how you should prop­er­ly lift it.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

This is the same for when you’re putting equip­ment up into trucks. A lot of the floor teams have some heavy equip­ment. You want to make sure that every­thing that you lift, you’re using your legs, you’re keep­ing your back straight and you’re just pick­ing it up kind of like that ver­sus just using your back like Hal­ston was.

Hal­ston:

That’s great. Awe­some. Yeah. So use your legs, not your back, and make sure you test the load to see how heavy it might be. Anoth­er thing that hap­pens is we end up hav­ing to move a lot of fur­ni­ture for teach­ers, whether it’s they want us to rearrange it or maybe we’re going to be doing some floor work and so we have to move the fur­ni­ture out of the way to do it. That means lift­ing some heavy stuff, some­thing like this dress­er. What I would rec­om­mend if any­time you have to lift some­thing that’s going to be as heavy as this dress­er or some­thing you can’t lift by your­self eas­i­ly, call in a team­mate. Call some­body like Justin and say, ​“Hey man, I need to do these floors. And in order to do that, I’m going to have to move some fur­ni­ture. So I need your help.” Then you’re going to lift it in the exact same way. You’re going to use your legs first, lift it and work togeth­er to lift some­thing that you could­n’t oth­er­wise lift by your­self. If you are by your­self, there are ways to do it and some of that is equipment.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

I mean we have some phe­nom­e­nal tools pro­vid­ed by the Budd Group, hand trucks, the flatbed carts, dol­lies. There’s all sorts of things that are avail­able to us to make sure that we’re not hurt­ing our­selves because we’re good to any­body if we’ve got to miss a day of work or God for­bid a lot longer than that.

Hal­ston:

Absolute­ly right. Always worth it to take the time to do it the right way. Find some­body to help you lift it or use the equip­ment that’s going to make it easy on you so that you don’t end up hurt. Well, that’s great. That’s the first thing we want­ed to tack­le here, so let’s move on to anoth­er project.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

All right, sounds good.

Hal­ston:

Pro safe­ty tip num­ber one. Before lift­ing or mov­ing any­thing, make sure to test how heavy it is before you try to move it. If it can be moved eas­i­ly, then make sure you’re using the prop­er tech­nique. Bend your knees and use the legs. Don’t bend or use your back so that we avoid injury. If the object is too heavy, call a team­mate to help you or seek out the prop­er equipment.

Hal­ston:

Well, you’ve shown us a lot of real­ly cool projects today. One more I want to ask you about though is as we’ve been walk­ing around and the guys at home can’t see this, but these floors look fan­tas­tic. They’re shiny, clean. I mean you can almost see your reflec­tion in them. So how are you guys able to do that?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Well, there are many, many com­po­nents to a good floor pro­gram. There’s of course sweep­ing, mop­ping, things that are hap­pen­ing gen­er­al­ly every day, but then there’s also scrub­bing and bur­nish­ing. At the root of all of that stuff is strip­ping and waxing.

Hal­ston:

Gotcha. Strip­ping and waxing.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Yep.

Hal­ston:

So I guess this is the machine that does it then.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

It sure is. This is called the rotary floor machine. These have been around for a pret­ty long time. These are def­i­nite­ly at the root of floor care. They spin at about 135 rev­o­lu­tions per minute and you can put all sorts of dif­fer­ent attach­ments on there. You can scrub the floor with them. You can scrub tile with them. You can do car­pet with them. Just a lot of dif­fer­ent things go on this machine.

Hal­ston:

Very cool. Why don’t you tell our folks watch­ing, how are we going to use this thing safe­ly? What are some kind of main­te­nance items we need to look out for to do it safely?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Well there are some things that you def­i­nite­ly want to make sure are done a man­ag­er can do in between jobs. When the job is actu­al­ly start­ed is not the time to be try­ing to fix a cord or some­thing like that. So kind of a check­list that a man­ag­er can go through is at the root of it is the cord. You can see this one is not a clean cord, it’s got some strip­per and wax residue on it, but there are no cuts on it. The next thing you want to look at is even this plug right down here. It’s got a cov­er on it that slides back, and you can see that this plug actu­al­ly goes into this oth­er piece. If that comes unplugged like that or if it’s hang­ing out, that could be the same thing is hav­ing a cut or some­thing like that in the cord. You’re still talk­ing about elec­tric­i­ty and mix­ing with water, which we all know can have some trag­ic results.

Hal­ston:

Nev­er good. Nev­er good.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Then also this bolt on here is a real­ly impor­tant thing. You want to make sure that that is tight. A man­ag­er can come through with some chan­nel locks or some type of a wrench and just make sure that that is tight. Because if that’s not tight, this is the lever that locks the han­dle up and down and if that bolt or that nut is not tight on that bolt, you can turn this all day and the han­dle is still going to move. That could result in loss of con­trol for the user if they’ve got the han­dle down and all of a sud­den it flies up or some­thing like that.

Hal­ston:

Okay. One more thing I noticed is I think that that plug looks new, that replace­ment plug, but the cord looks old. So is that a new plug?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

That is a new plug. These have three prongs on them and you can see I’m pulling out by the actu­al plug itself and not the cord. But these three prongs are real­ly impor­tant. They go in right here in the bot­tom. That’s the ground plug, and a lot of times these will fall out. They fall out because peo­ple may try to get 35 feet out of a 30 foot cord and they’re just try­ing to get just a lit­tle bit fur­ther with that machine and the pres­sure pulls that out away from the wall.

Hal­ston:

Very good. Very good. To me it looks a lit­tle com­pli­cat­ed to run this thing. How do you steer it once it’s going?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Well, it’s actu­al­ly a lot eas­i­er than it seems. It does take some prac­tice and some good ade­quate train­ing. You basi­cal­ly, you low­er the han­dle. I like to put this some­where down around my belt and then you want to make sure this is tight all the way so it does­n’t go up and down with­out you want­i­ng it to go up and down. Then it’s got a start switch right here that you lift up and you squeeze the trig­ger. I’m not going to do it because it’s plugged in and it’ll turn on. But then once it starts rolling, you just lift up and down to have it go left and right. Then of course walk­ing is going to make it go for­ward and backwards.

Hal­ston:

So up is left?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Down is left and up is right.

Hal­ston:

Okay.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

There’s no shame in not know­ing that off the top of your head.

Hal­ston:

That’s good. Yeah.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

I want­ed to make sure I was right.

Hal­ston:

Very good. Okay, very cool. I want to actu­al­ly see you run this thing and show us how you would do this room, but before we do that, is there any­thing, any kind of PPE that you would rec­om­mend wear­ing when you’re doing some­thing like this or any equip­ment that we would need to get this job done?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

I am so glad you asked because, Hal­ston, it seems like a lot of places that I go, strip­ping and wax­ing is such an impor­tant part of what we do here at the Budd Group that peo­ple kind of dis­re­gard the safe­ty things. But strip­per, whether it’s mixed up or def­i­nite­ly straight out of the jug can be absolute­ly cor­ro­sive. I’ve seen it eat through paper or sty­ro­foam cups before. That’s how strong this stuff is. So it’s real­ly impor­tant that we’re pro­tect­ing ourselves.

Hal­ston:

Gotcha.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Okay. Now this is kind of out of the ordi­nary, but you want to put on your gloves before you start work­ing. Usu­al­ly when peo­ple are clean­ing bath­rooms, you want to take them off as you leave the bath­room so that you’re not tak­ing germ from the bath­room and tak­ing them out. That’s because you’re try­ing to pre­vent the spread of germs. We’re putting these on today sim­ply to pro­tect our hands.

Hal­ston:

Okay.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Every­thing that you do when you’re mix­ing up your strip­per and you’re get­ting ready to go basi­cal­ly, you want to have your gloves on because you nev­er know where there’s going to be some old strip­per. Maybe it’s on an old shoe cov­er. Maybe it’s on a fun­nel. It’s a good idea to have the gloves on. Sort of at the heart of our pro­tec­tion are shoe cov­ers. These are the shoes for crews used by the Budd Group. These do a real­ly, real­ly phe­nom­e­nal job for just reg­u­lar wet sur­faces. If you’re just mop­ping a floor or some­thing like that. There have been some issues with stuff get­ting built up in these treads.

Hal­ston:

I see that.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Yeah. The treads are very, very close togeth­er and you’re going to be tak­ing old fin­ish off mixed with strip­per, so it’s going to turn into like a glue. Over time it’s just going to clog these treads up and these aren’t going to do any good. So it’s real­ly impor­tant to rinse them out at the end of your shift.

Hal­ston:

Okay. So rinse them out if you want those things to be effec­tive. Oth­er­wise it’s like wear­ing ice skates.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

It is. That’s exact­ly the way it is. Anoth­er good thing about these is they also pro­tect your shoes.

Hal­ston:

Okay. Yeah. Right.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Some peo­ple don’t want to get their shoes messed up. But these are prob­a­bly the favorites among every­body that I’ve seen. These just sim­ply strap onto your shoes. Now they don’t do any­thing as far as pro­tect­ing your shoes. But this mate­r­i­al, feel that Halston.

Hal­ston:

Yeah, it feels exact­ly like the pad.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

This is exact­ly the same mate­r­i­al as a strip­ping pad. These just do a phe­nom­e­nal job giv­ing you trac­tion. When you get into the details and the stuff, not just the main floor that you’re going to be doing with the machine, but most floor jobs usu­al­ly have one or two peo­ple going around with like a put­ty knife or a scraper get­ting the base­boards and all that stuff. You want to make sure that they’ve got some type of knee pro­tec­tion. These are just your stan­dard knee pads.

Hal­ston:

So that will pro­tect your knees as well as keep­ing the chem­i­cal off you.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Exact­ly.

Hal­ston:

Gotcha.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Then anoth­er thing that a lot of peo­ple over­look, but it’s real­ly impor­tant that that per­son who’s down there scrap­ing with a put­ty knife that’s flex­i­ble and bend­ing has glass­es on.

Hal­ston:

That’s right. Keep­ing it from splash­ing in their eyes.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Because any time, I’ve seen it hap­pen at any time, at any time the strip­per can get up into their eyes. I’ve seen what it does to flesh. I don’t want to know what it does to eyeballs.

Hal­ston:

Absolute­ly.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Then of course when it comes time to mix­ing the strip­per, you always want to fol­low the man­u­fac­tur­er’s instruc­tions as far as the pro­por­tion. For those of you who don’t know that, a real­ly easy way of doing that is tak­ing 128 because that’s the num­ber of ounces in a gal­lon, and if the solu­tion is call­ing for a one to four, then you divide it by four. If it’s call­ing from one to six, you would divide 128 by six. That’s going to give you the num­ber of ounces of strip­per you should mix with a gal­lon of water.

Hal­ston:

Gotcha.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

I like using these real thin fun­nels. I know a lot of peo­ple like to buy mea­sur­ing cups from the store and they’re actu­al mea­sur­ing cups. But those get lost. Those get mis­placed in clos­ets. Every­body’s got these. So you can see that there’s a mea­sur­ing ounces on there and that’s why you get the more nar­row fun­nels because these fit down in there. Then strip­per is going to come in a case and you just emp­ty it down in there and you can mea­sure it up. Always have gog­gles on.

Hal­ston:

I was going to say one thing I’ve seen as well as some­times you drop it or it hits some­thing. It’s just impor­tant any­time you’re pour­ing chem­i­cals, no mat­ter what chem­i­cals, make sure you’re wear­ing goggles.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Yes. I mean peo­ple who’ve done floors for awhile will tell you that that strip­per is no joke. I’ve got­ten it under fin­ger­nails and it hurts. It just keeps on eat­ing away at what­ev­er it’s touching.

Hal­ston:

We’ve gone through every­thing here. I think the last thing is why don’t you show us how to use this thing? I know there are a lot of dif­fer­ent tech­niques, but if you would just talk us through and show us what you think is the best way to kind of make your way around a room like this.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

The route is real­ly, real­ly impor­tant. We’re not going to strip this floor today, so I just have a pol­ish­ing pad on here, but I’ll do the same exact route that I would do if it were soak­ing in strip­per and I was tak­ing the wax off.

Hal­ston:

All right, take it away.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

All right.

Hal­ston:

After work­ing his way out of the room with the strip­ping solu­tion, notice how Justin works the perime­ter of the room first with the rotary floor machine to avoid walk­ing in a strip­ping solu­tion. This gives them a safe walk­ing sur­face around the room. Then he’s able to strip the mid­dle of the room in a back and forth man­ner again to avoid step­ping in the solution.

Hal­ston:

Pro safe­ty tip num­ber two. First, look at the machine. Ensure the cord has no nicks or cuts, is ful­ly intact and is prop­er­ly plugged in. Look at the plug and the out­let and make sure they’re safe for use. When strip­ping a floor, make sure you’re using the prop­er tech­nique. Hold the han­dle­bars firm­ly with both hands and at waste lev­el. Move slow­ly and ensure the cord is out of the way of the machine. Use the right PPE. Gloves, shoe cov­ers, knee pads, and eye pro­tec­tion are all nec­es­sary through­out this process. Final­ly, start on the perime­ter and work your way in. This way we’ll avoid step­ping on any wet surfaces.

Hal­ston:

Well, Justin, call me crazy, but this looks like the exact same machine we just used to strip and wax. Is that right?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Yeah, it def­i­nite­ly is the same machine. These rotary floor machines can be used for a vari­ety of clean­ing appli­ca­tions. We’re going to use it to clean this car­pet out right now.

Hal­ston:

So what method of clean­ing car­pet is this called? What are we about to do?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

We’re going to encap­su­late this car­pet. I’m going to show you how to do it. We’re not actu­al­ly going to do it right now.

Hal­ston:

Gotcha. So is that the only way there is to clean carpet?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Well, no, def­i­nite­ly not. There’s encap­su­la­tion, there’s extrac­tion, there’s bon­net­ing, there’s tra­di­tion­al, old fash­ioned, I call it sham­poo­ing. A lot of places frown upon it, but I know it’s still out there and it’s all gen­er­al­ly used with this pad.

Hal­ston:

Okay, so when are we going to use the encap­su­la­tion method?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

That would be for like this car­pet right here. You don’t see any vis­i­ble stains on it. It just has some dirt trails and stuff. You can tell where the occu­pants has gone over to his or her desk. The encap­su­la­tion is going to get that dirt up out of the car­pet pret­ty easily.

Hal­ston:

All right, so I know you point­ed at this pad. We’re just going to slap that pad on it and run it like a vacuum?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Absolute­ly not. If you were to do that, it would prob­a­bly send you right through this door. Per­haps even the wall. These things put out one and three quar­ters horse­pow­er, which does­n’t sound like enough, but I’ve seen it throw a 350 pound guy into dry wall and leave a dent because this pad was bone dry.

Hal­ston:

Okay, so how do we do it then?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Well, when you have the encap­su­la­tion clean­er in here, most of the time it’s in a pump sprayer. You mix it up accord­ing to the label instruc­tions. You want to spray it on the car­pet in small areas. But before you actu­al­ly get start­ed, you want to prac­ti­cal­ly drench this pad because as long as the pads wet, it tends to not get stuck in the car­pet and send peo­ple into walls and that sort of thing.

Hal­ston:

Okay, so we’ve got to get the pad wet.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Yep. Anoth­er thing that I’ll show you is real­ly, real­ly impor­tant, and the man­agers can do this in between jobs just sort of as a rou­tine main­te­nance thing, is if you see this nut right here over this bolt. That is actu­al­ly a lock­ing nut. Some­times these nuts will get lost and peo­ple go down to the hard­ware store and just put a reg­u­lar nut on there, not a lock­ing nut and this vibrates, this comes loose. Then what you have is a sit­u­a­tion where this han­dle, you might be run­ning it and it’s real­ly impor­tant that when you’re doing the car­pet with these pads, most peo­ple have the most con­trol when the han­dle is right around their belt clip.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

But once you lock this into posi­tion, you don’t want it to move sud­den­ly when you aren’t plan­ning on it. If that nut is not tight on there, this thing may come on unlocked and it may do just that and you may lose com­plete con­trol of the machine.

Hal­ston:

Gotcha. Okay. What oth­er safe­ty stuff do we need to know about run­ning this machine when we’re doing it on carpet?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Well, get­ting back to that nut, I don’t want to harp on it too much, but it’s a rou­tine main­te­nance thing. You need some sort of tool to actu­al­ly get that nut. It needs to be real­ly, real­ly tight. If that thing comes loose, you can turn this all you want and the han­dle is still going to come unlocked on its own sort of like it does right there.

Hal­ston:

Gotcha.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

That’s a rou­tine thing. Then real­ly the same things when we’re strip­ping a floor, they apply to this machine. Don’t have any nicks or cuts or any­thing in your cords. Make sure you’ve got three prongs down there. You can see this one was actu­al­ly replaced these with the ground plugs. It’s got to have the three plugs on there. They’re like, I don’t know, maybe $3 now at the hard­ware store and def­i­nite­ly does­n’t take an elec­tri­cian to swap one of these out. That’s pret­ty much about it when it comes to carpet.

Hal­ston:

All right, well good to know. Thanks for show­ing that to me. There was one more project I was hop­ing to see while I was here. I was hop­ing you could tell me-

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Hold on, Hal­ston. I don’t want to cut you off, but it’s real­ly, real­ly impor­tant that we have wet floor signs even when we’re doing carpet.

Hal­ston:

Oh man. I’m glad you told me that. I almost for­got. Even though we’re on… I mean I can’t slip on the car­pet though. So why would you need them?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

You can’t slip on it. Because you may have some­body… When you’re doing car­pet, most of these meth­ods are low mois­ture so you don’t have to shut down the area. You may have peo­ple still work­ing while you’re clean­ing the car­pet and they’re going to come walk­ing through here on this wet car­pet. It’s going to get their shoes wet. Right out there is VCT. If the fin­ished VCT comes in con­tact with a wet shoe, then it’s a real­ly good chance for slip­ping. There are many more falls from what I under­stand that if some­body is going to fall, it’s when they’re not expect­ing to fall. They’re walk­ing across this car­pet think­ing they have good trac­tion, take a step up there and they don’t have any traction.

Hal­ston:

Man, that’s great to know. Good. Well last thing I want­ed to see was a lit­tle bit of pres­sure wash­ing. Could you show me a lit­tle bit about pres­sure wash­ing, maybe go out­side and see that?

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

I’d real­ly, real­ly like to, and I do know a fair amount of that, but we hap­pen to have a res­i­dent expert right here in this office. His name’s Marco.

Hal­ston:

Awe­some.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Let me go get him. Hey, Mar­co. You in here?

Mar­co:

Yeah.

Justin Schoen­berg­er:

Can you come out here a minute with Hal­ston. He wants you to show him a lit­tle bit about pres­sure washing.

Mar­co:

Sure, I’d love to.

Hal­ston:

Hey. Hal­ston.

Mar­co:

Hey, Hal­ston. How are you doing, man?

Hal­ston:

I’m good. You want to show me a lit­tle bit about pres­sure washing?

Mar­co:

I’d love to. I got a guy down at the sta­di­um right now doing some.

Hal­ston:

All right. Let’s do it. All right.

Hal­ston:

Pro safe­ty tip num­ber three. Make sure your clean­ing pad is ful­ly wet using the encap­su­la­tion solu­tion before you put it on the rotary machine. Then ful­ly tight­en the lock­ing mech­a­nism, which is locat­ed below the han­dle­bars before you turn it on. Also make sure the plug is safe to use. Then always place wet floor signs around the area, even when you’re clean­ing carpet.

Hal­ston:

Hey, how’s it going?

Den­nis:

It’s going good. How you all doing?

Hal­ston:

Doing well.

Mar­co:

Hal­ston, this is Den­nis. He works on our land­scap­ing crew.

Den­nis:

[inaudi­ble 00:00:21:20].

Hal­ston:

Nice to meet you.

Mar­co:

He’s doing a lit­tle bit of pres­sure wash­ing for us today.

Hal­ston:

Cool. Cool. Yeah. Tell me a lit­tle about what he’s doing here.

Mar­co:

Well, we got some dis­col­or dis­col­oration on the con­crete here at the foot­ball sta­di­um we’re try­ing to get cleaned up with the pres­sure washer.

Hal­ston:

Very good. So I see he’s wear­ing a lot of stuff. Tell me a lit­tle bit about what you need to be wear­ing when you’re pres­sure washing.

Mar­co:

Well, first of all, you got to have the right PPE. You need to be wear­ing earplugs, your safe­ty glass­es. It’s pre­ferred to have steel toed shoes on because the pres­sure wash­er is such a high pres­sure piece of machin­ery. It can cause severe injury.

Hal­ston:

So that water’s com­ing out fast enough right there to hurt somebody?

Mar­co:

Yes it can. It can cause high pres­sure injec­tion, water injec­tion injuries, and nine times out of 10 that leads to ampu­ta­tion or severe nerve damage.

Hal­ston:

Wow. Wow. Good to know. PPE is important.

Mar­co:

Very impor­tant.

Hal­ston:

How do you get the thing started?

Mar­co:

Well, first of all, a lot of peo­ple don’t under­stand that you real­ly need to turn the water on to the unit before you crank the unit up.

Hal­ston:

So you need to hook it up and turn the water on before you start?

Mar­co:

Hook it up. Turn the water on, make sure that you get a flow of water into it. Then most of them have a kill switch on it. You can turn it on, turn it off by that switch, adjust your car­bu­re­tor or your throt­tle and give it a pull.

Hal­ston:

Gotcha, gotcha. All right. When you’re pres­sure wash­ing, how far away do we need to be? How do we need to spray to, you know.

Mar­co:

There’s dif­fer­ent tips. The red tip is a zero degree tip. That is a very fine stream that you don’t want to use when you’re pres­sure wash­ing con­crete or any­thing like that. That can real­ly dam­age the sur­face and also cause injury to some­body if they hit them. Then you got a yel­low tip and a white tip and a black tip. The yel­low tip I believe is the 25 degree. Then it goes to a 45 degree. But with those tips, we nor­mal­ly run the yel­low tip or the white tip.

Hal­ston:

Okay. So a lit­tle bit wider spray.

Mar­co:

A wider spray, and you don’t want to put right down on top of the sur­face. You want to keep a good even swing with your six inch­es or so. Keep it kind of in an angle.

Hal­ston:

And keep it moving.

Mar­co:

Keep it moving.

Hal­ston:

Okay. I’m sure dif­fer­ent pres­sure wash­ers have dif­fer­ent col­or tips, right? I guess you just need to pay atten­tion to what the num­ber is and fol­low the pre­ferred guide­lines for what ser­vice you’re using it on.

Mar­co:

Right, right. Actu­al­ly the yel­low tip is 15 degree. The white tip is 40 degree, and the red tip is zero degree. Like I say. You want to stay away from that red tip.

Hal­ston:

Okay.

Mar­co:

That’s the biggest thing. Either the white tip or the yel­low tip is what we use for doing con­crete cleaning.

Hal­ston:

Very good. All right, so we’re all done. We’ve cleaned every­thing up. We got the con­crete look­ing nice. How do we need to turn it off?

Mar­co:

Well, you turn your unit off, you cut the switch off on the unit. You go and cut your water off. Then you release the pres­sure on the unit from the gun.

Hal­ston:

Okay. So machine off first, and then water off, and then we’re going to release the pres­sure in that order.

Mar­co:

Right, right.

Hal­ston:

Well very good. Den­nis, I guess we need to let you get back to work, man, but I appre­ci­ate you tak­ing time to show us some of this stuff.

Den­nis:

Thank you.

Mar­co:

All right, bud­dy. We’ll see you later.

Den­nis:

Thank you, sir.

Mar­co:

Yep.

Hal­ston:

Pro safe­ty tip num­ber four. Always use the cor­rect PPE while pres­sure wash­ing. Use earplugs, eye pro­tec­tion and steel toed shoes. Before you turn the pres­sure wash­er on, first attach the water hose and release any pres­sure that’s built up in the noz­zle. Then crank it to start the engine. Also make sure you have the cor­rect noz­zle tip attached. When you start clean­ing, main­tain a six inch dis­tance from the sur­face away from your body and clean using a lat­er­al sweep­ing motion. When you’re fin­ished, turn off the machine first, then turn off the water source. Remem­ber to release any pres­sure that’s built up in the noz­zle afterwards.

The Budd Group strives to be a God-hon­or­ing com­pa­ny of excel­lence safe­ly deliv­er­ing ser­vices in jan­i­to­r­i­al, main­te­nance, and land­scap­ing; offer­ing devel­op­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties for their employ­ees; and con­tribut­ing to their community.

Inter­est­ed in work­ing for The Budd Group? We are hir­ing and offer benefits!

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Please use the links above for apply­ing to The Budd Group for any posi­tion through­out our com­pa­ny. How­ev­er, if you need to con­tact some­one regard­ing a spe­cif­ic ques­tion, please use the phone num­ber or email for the office near­est you from the list below