If some business owners had their way, they wouldn’t provide any restroom facilities at all for customers, and the second alternative would be nothing better than a porta-potty. After all, they might think, “Customers come to my establishment to shop, not to do their private and personal business.”
Thankfully, the vast majority of business owners, as well as their facility managers, think of restrooms as an extension of their business. When it comes to bathrooms, tech is on our side to make customers feel comfortable and hygienic.
Basic Minimums
A tricked out bathroom isn’t worth much if the HVAC unit creaks and the floors are dirty. Here are some of the current minimum standards in businesses today that are expected to be maintained:
Touchless Lighting
Long rails of fluorescent tubes is not the kind of lighting you want to have in a business. Fluorescent may be acceptable in schools or in a factory, where lots of people go in and out, but for a retail business, this isn’t ideal. However, with the advent of affordable automatic, touchless lighting, you can reduce likelihood of disease transmission and allow your sanitation-minded customers to breathe a sigh of relief.
Sparkling Tile Floors
The minute someone steps into a public or business restroom, they make an unconscious assessment on cleanliness by the look of the floor.
Besides looking nice, tiled floors, in particular, are really easy for the janitorial staff to keep clean.
But if you want to step up the bathroom to another level, you can opt for heated floors. Most suited to luxury hotels and ultra high-end environments, heated floors work by laying tile over a radiant heating system that allows heat to take its natural course—upwards.
Anti-Graffiti Self-Healing Bathroom Partitions
One of the most important considerations for small businesses is adding new bathroom partitions. Gone are the days when a traditional powder-coated partition is in vogue. Powder-coated partitions are cheap but have a major weakness, and that’s graffiti.
Traditional powder-coated partitions scratch, dent, and get scratched and marked up fast. And bathroom graffiti tends to be less than family friendly, which means getting rid of it immediately is a must. And no repainting will cover up dents in the partition resulting from boisterous activity.
All of the reasons above are grounds for going for higher tech HDPE solid plastic restroom partitions. They are practically indestructible, very hard to carve into, resist magic marker ink, and allow most to be easily removed with a little rubbing alcohol. You can even heal deep scratches simply by applying heat. The heat softens the thru-colored HDPE and allows it to smooth out the disturbed scrawls that inevitably manifest over time.
In bigger cities, there may be large plumber warehouses that have all of the hardware a facility manager might need.
However, the best prices and the largest selection of bathroom partitions and hardware will be found online via national distributors. Brackets, latches, and the like all have to be replaced at the first sign of rust. Depending on the type of toilet partitions your building has, you may need to get special hardware specifically designed for the material you have.
Regardless of whether you buy locally or online, keep your restrooms in top shape if you want customers to keep coming back to your establishment.
Touchless Fixtures
Touchless technology is the way to go to encourage cleanliness, reduced water waste, reduced messes, and ease of clean-up, not to mention closing down a restroom when water overflows from continually running urinals or clogged sinks.
The amount of water alone you will save by installing urinals and sinks with touchless technology more than makes up for their cost.
Smart Toilets
Smart toilets are an entire subject unto themselves. About the only thing standard with modern-day smart toilets is the sensor that senses when the person gets up and automatically flushes the toilet.
Sensored toilets are often recommended for a business or commercial atmosphere because nothing is worse than entering a stall and discovering the waste leftover from a clogged toilet. And for some odd reason, a small but significant portion of people will deliberately not flush toilets.
Moreover, nobody wants to use their hands to flush a toilet in a public restroom. The sanitary connotations are just too overwhelming to contemplate.
However, in high-end establishments like 5-star hotels, the hotel facility manager may follow the trends of Europeans and the Japanese and have toilets that flip up the lid automatically, heat the seat, and provide water jet bidet technology.
While this is an expensive installation, they nevertheless can set a business apart in high-end hotels or restaurants.
More Comfortable Environment Controls
It’s entirely possible to buy environmental controls for restrooms such as sensors that turn the light on and off when people enter and leave, thermostats that control the room temperature, odor control monitors that periodically send a chemical mist in the air, and dehumidifiers.
These amenities, although they tend to be expensive, are worth it to high-end restaurants and hotels who want to give their customers the star treatment.
And trust us, word does get around that a certain restaurant or hotel has fabulous restroom facilities.