Should You Rent or Buy a Floor Scrubber?

For the purpose of this post, I’m going to assume that you already sweep and scrub your warehouse floor in some form or fashion. If you don’t, stop reading this right now, go pick up a broom and then come back to read the rest.

Our Solutions Provider, Kelly Adamson, was talking to one of her customers when she found out they rented a riding floor scrubber a couple of times throughout the year. Since their facility had yearly audit inspections performed by the American Institute of Baking (AIB International), maintaining their floor’s cleanliness is very important to them.

While your mileage may vary on how clean your facility is expected to be, a majority of facilities we see could use improved floor maintenance. After Kelly asked about the possibility of them purchasing a riding floor scrubber instead of renting one, the customer had a great question.

Does it make financial sense to buy versus rent? Using the steps below, we were able to help them determine their return on investment (ROI) and time to pay back if they were to purchase an automatic scrubber.

Determine current labor costs

Ask your CFO what labor costs are for the warehouse staff that would be performing the cleaning duties. Make sure to include things like benefits to get a true feel for the cost of each employee per hour.

How long does it take to clean your facility?

This is pretty self-explanatory. Write down what time you start and finish cleaning. Our customer had a hard time nailing down an exact amount of time because they didn’t have floor cleaning built into their daily schedule. On the occasions that they did rent, they kept the unit for a week and used it while they had the time throughout the day.

One thing to keep in mind is to include the amount of time it takes to sweep the floor prior to running the ride-on scrubber. Include this time because you can purchase a ride-on scrubber with an attachment that sweeps the floor as you scrub it. This would eliminate 80% of manual pre-sweeping and allow an apples-to-apples comparison when researching a unit with a pre-sweep. Check out all the options of FlexPAC’s floor scrubbers here. 

How much does a rental cost?

Make sure you include the total cost of rental including delivery fees, taxes and other surcharges you may incur.

How many times do you plan to scrub your floors?

This was a major consideration for our customer. They had been renting a scrubber 2-4 times a year at 5 days per rental. Recurring rental costs are a real concern when going the rental route. Be honest with yourself on how many times you will need to get a rental if you don’t get one currently. Our customer wasn’t cleaning their floors as much as they would like to because of the recurring costs. This was a key factor in determining payback time. The more they planned to rent, the quicker their payback time would be from purchasing.

One last thing to keep in mind is to ensure you are comparing like machines. Your rental unit may be faster or have additional features that the unit you are looking to purchase doesn’t have. With just a few pieces of easily accessible data, you can determine if renting an automatic floor scrubber makes more sense than buying.

If your company would like an analysis on your current scrubber rental and look into our solution to your problem, contact us for a free needs analysis.