The Opportunity

The customer is a swine research facility. In their clean-in-place process, the customer has noticed a great deal of soil left behind, and stains on floors, walls and caging. The customer has tried heavy scrubbing, a leading peroxide-based competitor, bleach, CLR and even power washing to clean the room with no discernable difference in the amount of built up soil. Soils were primarily swine feces & urine, feed, and hay soils built up over the course of two years.

The Challenge: Large Animal Housing Soils

Large animal housing presents a fundamentally different cleaning challenge than standard facility maintenance. Accumulated layers of protein, microbial biomass, urine residues, fecal material, and feed byproducts build up over months of continuous occupancy. These deposits become physically cohesive and highly adherent over time. Standard pre-cleaning guidance was not written with these conditions in mind, and conventional methods often prove inadequate.

In this case, the facility had attempted power washing—yet as you can see in Figure 1 below, taken directly after power washing, the soils remained heavily embedded and stained on floors, walls, and caging. This demonstrates the critical limitation of mechanical force alone when dealing with proteinaceous, layered biosoil deposits.

The Quip Labs Solution

We provided a demonstration of ViveSecure, a two-part PerQuat-based cleaner/disinfectant from Sterilex and offered exclusively to the Life Sciences market by Quip Laboratories. ViveSecure has a chemical "scrubbing" action that can help to break up tough proteinaceous soils without excessive, labor-intensive mechanical scrubbing. It has a mild pH for improved user safety and wastewater discharge.

The two part chemistry was mixed by hand to a 1:1:10 concentration for this demonstration, and then applied using a Pump Up Pro Foamer. The solution was then scrubbed lightly with a 2" bristle brush. The heavy soils and stains immediately began to break up, and rinsing showed noticeably cleaner caging, walls and floors. The customer also found that the product had virtually no smell, which can be a benefit when dealing with large animal holding areas.

Results and Benefits

• Heavy, built up soils were washed away with minimal scrubbing and soak time
• Doesn't require multiple employees or dangerous power washers to clean
• Caging has reduced capacity to carry harmful pathogens that can impact animal health
• Reduced chemical spend: faster soil removal requires less frequent applications of chemical
• Reduced odor in cleaning products means less of a chance of animal behavioral study variables

This information is presented in good faith, but no warranty, expressed or implied is given. Changes can be made to this document without notice. All final determinations on the suitability of this product are the sole discretion of the purchasing parties.