You get one window.
We finish inside it.

That is the whole job, and the answer depends on an honest count rather than on enthusiasm. We walk the site during production, count the plant surrounds and the hand-work areas properly, and give you an hours figure and the crew size needed to hit your window. If the window is too short for the scope you want, we will tell you at the walkthrough and offer you a shorter scope instead of a longer shutdown.

You do, under your own procedure, and it has to be done and tagged before we start. That duty sits with the site rather than with us, and we will not take it on informally because a shutdown is running behind. We clean what is isolated and tagged, we clean surrounds and exteriors of what is not, and we do not enter confined spaces at all.

Cleaning inside a food environment has to run to your own HACCP-based plan: your approved products, your dilutions, your sequence and your verification records, with every clean documented so it can be audited. If we cannot meet your program, we will say so rather than work around it.

Yes, and it is usually the better way to run it. Amenities, walkways, the floor and the accessible plant surrounds on a weekly or fortnightly visit, with the heavy plant work saved for the shutdown. Residue that is a fortnight old takes a fraction of the time that residue baked on for a quarter does, so the recurring visit tends to pay for itself in shutdown hours you do not buy.

Whatever your site approves, and nothing else. Industrial degreasers and descalers include caustic and acidic products that damage the wrong substrate and injure people who use them without training, so the product list belongs on the scope with the Safety Data Sheets attached rather than in a cleaner’s van. Where your program names a product, yours wins.

We walk the site while it is running, which is the only way to see where the residue actually goes, and we ask what you make before we ask how big the floor is. Then you get a written scope by stage, an hours estimate against your window, a crew size, and a recommendation on what should be recurring rather than in the shutdown. No obligation.

A good quote shows shutdown work and recurring work separately. The price moves with what the site produces, how much of the area is hand work rather than machine work, how long the window is, and how long since the last proper clean. That's why we quote rather than publish a flat rate that would be wrong for most sites. Tell us the basics and you'll have a price back quickly, with no obligation attached to it.

It is the process of isolating plant from every energy source and physically locking and tagging the isolation so it cannot be reversed while someone is working on the machine. Cleaning needs it because cleaning puts hands, cloths and water inside guarding, and unexpected start-up during that work is a recognised cause of serious injury and death. Switching a machine off is not isolation: hydraulic pressure, compressed air, gravity loads, residual heat and stored electrical charge can all remain.

Food businesses must keep premises, fixtures, fittings and equipment in a clean and sanitary condition under the Food Standards Code, and a food production site normally meets that through a HACCP-based food safety program in which cleaning is a prerequisite program — documented tasks, frequencies, approved chemicals and verification records. Customer and certification audits look for that documentation. Your own program and your regulator are the authoritative sources. This is general information, not compliance advice.

In a general industrial site, visually and against the written scope. In food production it goes further: visual inspection plus swab or ATP testing on food contact surfaces, recorded against the cleaning schedule, so there is evidence the clean achieved something rather than that it happened. Verification is your program’s responsibility rather than the contractor’s, but the contractor’s records have to be good enough to sit inside it.

Some of it, and it depends what you make. Flour, sugar, timber, and certain plastics and metals produce combustible dust, and once it accumulates on ledges, plant and roof structure it becomes a fire and, in the right conditions, explosion risk. Metal swarf and fine mineral dust are abrasive and respiratory concerns instead. The common thread is that the dangerous accumulation is usually the one nobody can reach without an elevating work platform.

A warehouse stores product and a factory makes it, and everything else follows from that. Warehouse cleaning is largely floors, racking, docks and amenities, priced on area and access, and done on a recurring schedule. Factory cleaning adds production residue specific to what is made, plant that must be isolated before anyone works near it, and a shutdown window that is fixed months in advance. Same trade, materially different job.