What equipment does a professional cleaning company actually use?

Asking a contractor which brands they use tells you nothing you can act on: a fleet changes, a machine breaks down, a model gets replaced. Three questions, on the other hand, produce answers you can verify.

1. What function does this machine perform on my site? Stripping, extracting, removing mineral dust, washing high-level glazing, lifting an outdoor deposit. If the answer is "everything", there is no answer.
2. What technical characteristic makes it capable of doing that? A rotation speed, a filtration class, a temperature and an injection pressure, a working height, an airflow rate. These are the values that go into a work protocol and that you can hold a contractor to.
3. What consumable will be fitted, and on what basis? This is the most discriminating question of the three, and we come back to it below.

These three questions belong in any tender document, where they usefully replace a request for an equipment list: see our article on what to ask for in a cleaning tender.

A machine transmits energy. What actually touches your floor, your fabric or your glass is a consumable, and it is the consumable that decides the result, and the damage.

• Under a rotary machine, a soft pad polishes, a mid-range pad handles a greasy build-up, an aggressive pad strips a resistant floor, a bristle brush works into a textured surface, a diamond pad works a calcareous stone. The same machine revives a marble floor or destroys it, depending on what is fitted to it.
• On a squeegee, a nicked rubber blade leaves a water line on every pass. It gets turned or changed, never worked around.
• On a vacuum, a clogged filter drops the airflow: the machine screams and picks up nothing.
• In wiping, a saturated microfibre cloth redeposits what it just picked up. Colour-coding by zone also stops cross-contamination from a soiled zone into a clean one.

The question to ask a contractor is therefore not "what machines do you have?" but "how do you choose the consumable, and on what basis?". The right answer mentions identifying the surface and a test on a sample patch. The detail of that choice on stone floors is in our article on choosing a rotary machine pad.

Wattage is the most misleading selling point in the industry. It measures the motor's power draw, not its ability to pick anything up.

What actually counts:

• Airflow, expressed in litres per second or cubic metres per hour. It is what carries particles into the tank. A very powerful machine with a narrow hose and a clogged filter picks up less than a modest, well-maintained one.
• Suction, which lifts what is stuck to a surface.
• The filtration class on the exhaust. On building-site dust — plaster, cement, cutting silica — inadequate filtration puts back into the room exactly what it just picked up. The white haze reappears an hour after the pass.
• Hose diameter, which decides what gets through without blocking it.
• Wet-and-dry operation, essential for recovering rinse water from stripping work.

This is also why extraction always comes before washing: mopping over dry mineral dust makes an abrasive slurry that scratches the very floor you are trying to clean. The full case is in our article on why a domestic vacuum is not enough after building work.

Three families answer three needs that do not substitute for one another.

• Slow rotation. A single pad turns at low speed and applies constant mechanical force without heating the surface. This is the machine for stripping and deep restoration work. The low speed is a technical choice: on a calcareous stone, a high speed burns the polish.
• Fast rotation. It is used for buffing and bringing back shine on a surface that is already sound, not for cleaning. Using it on a dirty floor just polishes the dirt in.
• The scrubber-dryer. It washes and picks up the dirty water in the same pass. Its strength is throughput on large, clear floor plates — a warehouse, a hall, a wide circulation area. It loses every advantage in a room cluttered with furniture, where it cannot get through and the corners are still done by hand.

A fourth tool deserves a mention because it is so often missing: the dilution station or the doser. A product dosed by eye is either ineffective or leaves a residue that makes the floor greasy and pulls dust back in the very next day. It is the single most common cause of a floor that dulls despite regular cleaning.

On a sofa, a mattress or a rug, the soiling is not on the surface: it has gone down into the fibre and the foam. A useful treatment therefore does two things: it lifts the soiling, then it brings it back up.

Three settings are adjusted on an injector-extractor, and they depend on the fabric, not on the operator's habit:

• Injection pressure, reduced on fragile fibres and untreated fabrics.
• Temperature, never high on a protein-based stain — blood, milk, sweat — which heat would cook permanently into the fibre.
• The amount of water applied, which sets the drying time and, with it, the risk of a ring mark or a smell.

What this family does not treat: leather and faux leather, where injected water crosses the seams and swells the foam. The full reasoning is on our upholstery page for Marrakech, and the comparison with steam is in our article on choosing between steam and hot-water extraction.

This is the one field where the deciding characteristic is not a machine but a fluid.

Mains water carries mineral salts. As it dries on glass, it leaves the white haze everyone recognises, and Marrakech water is hard. A treatment chain — sediment pre-filter, reverse-osmosis membrane, ion-exchange resin — brings the dissolved-solids reading below ten parts per million, checked with a conductivity meter before every job.

Water at that level has nothing left to leave behind: it dries on its own in the open air, without marking. That is what makes it possible to work at height from the ground, with nobody there to wipe up afterwards.

Hence the equipment that goes with it: a carbon-fibre telescopic pole carrying a brush head, fed from a cart on the ground. Our working limit is 5 metres, from the ground, provided the ground at the foot of the wall is clear — no planting, no pond, no vehicle, no change of level.

Up to 3 metres, the base price applies; between 3 and 5 metres, by pole, a +25% supplement applies, with feasibility confirmed on photos. EPUREVA has neither a cherry picker nor ropes, does not hire them in and does not subcontract this kind of access: above 5 metres, or without clear ground, the job is not taken on, and that is said before the quote, not after. The mechanics of streaking are explained in our guide to washing windows without streaks.

This has to come last, because it is what actually decides the quality of a job, and it cannot be bought.

• Time. A disinfectant has a contact time. A stripper has a dwell time. A textile has a drying time. No machine shortens these; a rushed team skips them, and the work is not done.
• Sequence. Top before bottom, dry before wet, detergent before disinfectant, extraction before washing. A reversed sequence undoes the previous steps, whatever the equipment.
• Identifying the surface. Polished concrete, polished marble, tadelakt, varnished parquet and glazed tiling call for neither the same product nor the same consumable. The mistake is irreversible and costs more than ten years of upkeep.
• Not crossing circuits. Equipment that has come out of a washroom does not go into a kitchen. That is protocol, not equipment.

Our fleet is published by family and by function, without naming a single brand, on our equipment page, and the protocol applied before the first move is on our method page. For a tender file, the itemised list is provided in writing with the quote, which you can request here.