Wash Fountain Vs. CleanTech® EVO Automatic Hand Wash for Food Safety

Wash fountains are a common sight in many hygiene zones across the world. They are large, seem to work for a high volume of foot traffic, and they’re hands free. How do they stack up against CleanTech® Automated Handwashing Stations though? CleanTech® can address these same points more efficiently and even address the issues that wash fountains can create for hygiene zones in food safety.

Wash Fountains are more variable than CleanTech® EVO

Regardless of all the ways in which a wash fountain is different than a regular sink one may use at home, they’re still fundamentally the same when it comes to the hand wash itself. Each hand wash varies from person to person. An effective manual hand wash requires quite a few steps including rubbing lather on the back of the hand, between fingers and fingernails, and adequate rinsing after proper scrubbing. Therefore, it is very difficult to monitor if every person is getting an effective hand wash before entering a production zone. Wash Fountain _Hershey West

Review the Proper steps for a Manual Hand Wash

With CleanTech® Automated Handwashing Stations we’ve removed the variability and replaced it with the exact same automatic hand wash for every user. Once a person places their hands in a CleanTech® system, the cylinders inside the system then rotate around the hands and lather the proper amount of our UltraPure hygiene solution mixed with the proper amount of water and then rinses the hands until all the solution has been removed along with 99.9% of pathogens. This process is the same for the first person that uses the station to the last person, and it only takes 12 seconds. That means both faster and more effective hand washes between breaks and shift changes.

Do wash fountains have any hand washing efficacy data?

It would be impossible to test the efficacy of hand washing for a wash fountain because of that variability we’ve mentioned above. Any sort of efficacy data would fail to be repeated since everyone washes their hands differently.

With CleanTech® Automated Handwashing Stations food safety leaders can rest assured that when their employees are using the CleanTech® systems, they’re using a system that has been proven by clinical studies to remove 99.9% of pathogens such as Norovirus, Coronavirus, and E-Coli. In fact, since our systems have been proven to be so effective, they’ve been confirmed to meet the standards set forth by both the FDA and USDA for use in food processing facilities and are known to show a commitment to food safety to independent auditors such as GFSI.

Every CleanTech® automated industrial handwashing station also exceeds the most stringent CDC, FSMA, BRC, SQF and NSF requirements while providing QA/QC teams with handwash tracking for SOP validation. On each station, two hand washing counters are available: a master counter that gives you a collective number of hygiene events performed for that specific machine and an optional resettable counter that can be reset to zero at the push of a button to give QA/QC managers a resettable data point to ensure employees are following hand washing SOPs without having to police the behavior.

View our Efficacy Studies

Wash Fountains Pose Major Contamination Risks in Hygiene Zones

Foot traffic flow is a major concern for food safety leaders in charge of hygiene compliance.
With wash fountains, they’re usually centrally located in the hygiene zone room and take up quite a large amount of space. This makes it difficult to not only control flow through a hygiene zone but also properly monitor if hygiene protocols are being followed, especially during large shift changes or break periods.

Screen Shot 2023-01-20 at 3.38.06 PMWith CleanTech® Automated Handwashing Stations in hygiene zones, there is less of a concern for cross contamination risks and hygiene zone monitoring since the systems are wall mounted and can easily be placed to ensure proper flow of foot traffic. This placement also leaves the middle of the room open so that anyone can easily view all areas of the hygiene zone or additional compliance measures like barriers or forced-compliance points can be installed to ensure all hygiene steps are followed . CleanTech® systems also remove the need to monitor each individual hand wash since every employee is getting the same effective wash without the need to touch any soap dispensers.

View an Automated Hygiene Zone

Automated Handwashing Stations are More Water Efficient than Wash Fountains

Water consumption is a major concern for many food processing plants. With at least 40 states anticipating water shortages in the next decade, the need to conserve water is critical. With a manual hand wash, a user wastes a significant amount of water while scrubbing their hands while the faucet is still running. Since a wash fountain turns on all the faucets on the unit when a person steps on the pedal, this results in an even larger amount of wasted water than a regular sink. EVO_ControlledAccess_TransparentBackground- SMALL

With CleanTech® Automated Hand Washing Stations, every last drop of water is being used for the hand wash. There is no need to worry about the system staying on longer than is necessary since each station is preprogrammed to be timed for 12 seconds. CleanTech® also uses only 0.6 gallons of water during each hygiene event.

Here’s what one of our customers have had to say about their water savings:

"Kern Meat Company also invested in two handwashing stations for its processing room that Dr. Sherman says delivers a safer and cleaner handwashing solution than traditional soap and water. The stations achieved the same efficacy in 12 seconds as handwashing reached in 20 seconds. The handwashing stations also provided some energy savings. At the former plant, which was five times smaller than the new one, the company consumed about 400 gallons of water per day for employee handwashing; the new stations cut that in half."

Learn More about CleanTech® Water Savings

With CleanTech® Automated Hand Washing Stations, there’s no question if you’re getting a better hand wash for your employees than you would with a wash fountain. On the surface, wash fountains may seem like a logical hand washing product for large shifts , but once you start to examine their pitfalls, you’ll see that automated hygiene is vastly more effective and more efficient for employee hygiene.

Learn More about Why Automation is Important for Food Safety Here

 

 

 

 

 

Topics:CleanTech® Handwashing StationsFood Processing