Laundry Consulting and Design

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Turn-Key Laundry Services – It’s All About You

The first step in achieving our goal of providing the best possible value to our customers is to fully understand where our customer is coming from. What type of organization do you work with – hospitality, healthcare, garment/uniform, other? What type of facility do you have – OPL, centralized laundry or contract services? What type of linen do you process? How much linen do you process? How much time do you have to do it in? How much space do you have to work with? What are your objectives? Would attractive ownership options help you move forward with your plans?

With information gained in this discovery process, we will be able to visualize a solution. We will build upon this concept and create a laundry design that will deliver exactly what you need. By understanding the whole picture and knowing how each component of a successful laundry will interact, we can design a laundry that fits your space, utilities, time, objectives, budget and environmental responsibility.

The secret is to know your customer and the key to that is asking the right questions and listening to the answers.

Consulting – A Century of Expertise

Water Energy has assembled a team of experienced laundry design, construction and operation engineers with over a Century of combined experience in designing, building and running large-scale laundries. Our guys know pretty much everything you need to know about laundry and how to make what you need all come together in an efficient and effective manner. These guys didn’t start out in large laundries, so they do understand the specific needs of all sizes of laundry operations.
Each of our engineers has a lifetime of experience to help him fully understand your needs within your operational environment. With information about your laundry requirements and about the size and location of your building, we can design a first-class laundry that you will be very proud of and satisfied with for years to come.

  • A laundry that focuses on consistent delivery of a finished product able to meet even the highest quality control standards
  • A laundry that has the best equipment available – but not always the most expensive
  • A laundry that is highly efficient – keep labor costs down
  • A laundry that is affordable – financing is a snap with attractive ownership options
  • A laundry that is effective and dependable – know in your heart that your laundry WILL get done
  • A laundry that pays for itself over and over with labor, water and energy savings
  • A laundry that is environmentally responsible – gain valuable LEED certification points and qualify for numerous tax credits and rebates

Every facet of our laundry design services are focused on these priorities. With the huge variety of linens these days from high thread-counts and over-sized sheets and pillow cases to a huge variety in the actual quality and durability of fabrics these linens are made of, you need a dependable laundry system that will protect your valuable linens from chemical, heat and dry time extremes. That’s what Laundry Consulting and Design provides.

Water Energy Laundry Consulting engineers have far-reaching experience with every aspect of laundry conception, design, construction and operation. Their abilities also include directing and training employees in various phases of laundry and dry cleaning processes including receiving, examining, sorting and marking/tracking linens; packing and operating washers / tumblers / extractors / presses; spotting analysis and spot removal; maintaining reports and using time studies to evaluate the efficiency of facility operations. This analysis of efficiency allows you to make critical adjustments in your laundry room layout and operation that will afford you exceptionally efficient production methods.

The gage of this efficiency is Pounds-Per-Operator-Hour, or PPOH. This is one of the most important efficiency statistics you can calculate for your laundry facility. This average value represents just how much linen each operator is processing each hour. You take the volume of linen processed, divided by the number of hours needed to process it divided by the number of employees you have doing the work. The higher the number, the higher efficiency you have in your laundry. The higher the number, the lower your labor cost is. PPOH is absolutely a function of how well you design, operate and manage your laundry. You want employees to be able to accomplish the highest amount of work with the least amount of movement to do it. This is achieved by strategic placement of the laundry equipment within the laundry and this is achieved by having many years of experience with how to design a laundry for optimum efficiency.

No matter how efficient your equipment is and how much energy you eliminate from the process, your biggest savings by far will always come from reducing the number of hours or amount of labor needed to process your linens. That is a very hard fact. We all know how modern advances help to reduce the amount of labor required to deliver a product. Better equipment and computer controls have enabled companies to provide higher quality products and services with less and less labor. Your laundry is not any different. Labor is your most expensive component.

With Water Energy Laundry Consulting and Design on your team, your laundry will certainly be a winner.

Design – From the Ground Up

Laundry Consulting and Design engineers laundries from the ground up – literally. We can design a laundry to fit into the space you have reserved for the laundry in your new building or we can upgrade/retrofit an existing laundry with the most efficient design in the space available or we can design and build a building to be perfectly-suited for your laundry operations. We provide a layout that is designed around years of experience and understanding of how a hotel or healthcare laundry works. How the linens flow from incoming dirty linen carts, across the scales to the sorting conveyor, to the washers and on to the dryers and/or ironers, to the folders, stackers, wrappers, scales/billing/staging and back to the user. The washers and dryers are placed strategically in the space available to facilitate the least amount of labor/motion to get the linens to the next stage of the process while satisfying any applicable codes like air flow in healthcare linen facilities. The sorting area, soak sink, folding tables and/or ironers are also positioned strategically to afford the highest efficiency and least amount of movement by laundry personnel to complete the job. The positioning of this equipment is all determined by years of experience, time and motion studies, efficiency research and other factors like where the doors are going to be and if there is an outside wall in the laundry facility. You need easy access into and out of a laundry room so you can’t put anything too close to the doors and you should always put the dryers near the outside wall so you can easily vent the exhaust to the exterior of the building. You will also need to have a balance between incoming airflow and exhaust to ensure proper dryer burner operation. You will always need a lint filter. It is mandated by the air quality control board and you don’t want your guests to experience ‘Summer Snow’ in the parking lot. Lint blowing around is never attractive.

Our design drawings will include very specific placement instructions for the utilities and equipment. Also included is a utility schedule that will specifically detail water, power, gas, drain, incoming air flow and exhaust requirements.

There are many details for building any laundry right and even more with a Water Energy Green Laundry System. All of the details and guidelines are clearly and completely illustrated in our laundry design plans created for the customers and their construction engineers. Laundry Consulting can provide everything you need to build your laundry right. This includes specifying exactly what utilities you will need to accomplish your task with MEP drawings and utility schedules for the building contractors. These drawings will have all necessary information including what size of utility lines are needed and where to stub them out for later connection to your laundry equipment; every aspect of what is required in the foundation to support the various pieces of laundry equipment; exactly how and where to build the drain troughs designed for our Green Laundry System. Our design instructions will also include other important information often overlooked by less-experienced laundry design personnel. Details about having the proper sized doors to get everything into and out of the laundry efficiently and having the best available ceiling height in the laundry for airflow, overhead ducts and lines, conveyors, equipment operation and employee comfort. We have worked with a huge variety of equipment and know how to integrate the best and most proven technologies into your new laundry facility for the most efficient and cost effective laundry you can build. We know down to the square inch of how much space you are going to need and exactly what equipment you will need to accomplish your laundry production goals.

Water Energy Laundry Consulting and Design considers all available, relevant information when designing, building or renovating a healthcare or hospitality laundry facility. Relevant information can be vastly different from one laundry to the next and appropriate design parameters can vary by a large margin also. We draw upon an ever-growing body of information when visualizing laundry design solutions for our clients. Our laundry knowledgebase includes but is not limited to information about the following items:

  • Air Compressors
  • Air Quality Management / Air Handling
  • Banding Equipment
  • Barrier Walls
  • CAD Drawings
  • Cardinal Rule
  • Cart Dumpers
  • Cart Washers
  • Ceiling Height
  • Chemicals / Ozone
  • Computer Tracking and Bar Coding
  • Conventional vs. Tunnel Washers
  • Conveyor Systems
  • Dryers
  • HLAC
  • Hot Water Systems
  • Hours of Production
  • Ironers
  • Laundry Carts
  • Laundry Chutes
  • Laundry Scales
  • Lighting
  • Lint Filters
  • PPOH
  • Preventative Maintenance
  • Staging of Linens
  • Stain % Averages
  • Steam Tunnels
  • Sorting
  • Table Height
  • Towel Folders
  • Training
  • Tying Machines
  • Washers
  • Water Hardness / Water Softener
  • Water Line Size / Pressure
  • Water Reuse
  • Work Flow