How best to dispense cleaning products?
Lyndon | Hygiene Advisor

Cleaning chemicals diluted wrongly cause all sorts of problems. Get it wrong with too much and you’re faced with sticky residue. Also this wastes money and can even harm surfaces. However at the opposite extreme, if you under-dose the products won’t be effective.

Spending most of my time with commercial cleaning companies here’s the 4 dilution methods I encounter most often.


1. Hope for the best (a few decent splosh-fuls and a glug for luck)

• Pros: Easy to implement, nice to imagine it will work

• Cons: Doesn’t work

2. Use a drum pump (aka pelican pump, shot pump, ounc-a-matic etc)

• Pros: Easy to understand, low cost.

• Cons: Still easy to overdose, not straightforward enough for operatives to convert dilution rate on bottle to number of pumps for this bucket

3. Thorough staff training

• Pros: Highly effective, well-trained staff are more efficient. It’s essential – any attempt at dilution control can fail if staff are not a) trained and b) on board with the importance of accurate dosing

• Cons: Easy to neglect especially when staff turnover rate is high. Provokes the question “what if I train my staff and they leave?” but also “what if I don’t train them and they stay?”

4. Bottles with dosing chamber

• Pros: Difficult to misuse, very low cost in use, and also reduces plastic waste, transport/emissions and saves storage space.

• Cons: Maybe there are some??