Haddon’s Commercial Laundry Facilities Planning Guide

We’ve created Haddon’s Commercial Laundry Facilities Planning Guide to ensure our clients, in all industries in British Columbia—especially hospitality and healthcare—have all their bases covered before installing new laundry equipment or upgrading existing laundry facilities.

Here at Haddon, we often deal first hand with the issues and challenges that pop up when commercial laundry rooms aren’t set up or planned properly. Don’t get us wrong, either, it’s not anyone’s fault when this happens, it’s just that architects or contractors are not always familiar with the ins and outs of specs needed to make an industrial laundry operation run smoothly from machines to processes. 

From dealing with doors that are too narrow to allow passage of commercial washers and dryers to concrete floors that aren’t thick enough or already have the plumbing set up in the wrong places to improper venting that leads to frozen pipes—we’ve seen and worked around it all. Issues like this can totally be avoided from the get go if people just do a bit of research and get help from the experts (like our Haddon staff) when planning the layout of a commercial laundry operation. 

Here’s what we’re going to cover in this helpful how-to guide for commercial laundry facilities planning:

Why is it so important to properly plan the layout and setup of a commercial laundry facility?

Well, the layout of your laundry room may seem straightforward, but it can actually become complicated if you don’t factor in certain essentials BEFORE you buy machines or install plumbing, etc. Even the most seasoned architects and contractors adept at navigating complex designs will find new challenges and opportunities in planning on-premise laundries. 

This Planning Guide for Commercial Laundries is an essential resource for BC business owners who want to save money and time by ensuring their laundry room facilities are up and running on time and budget.

Essential Planning Factors for On-Premise Laundry Facilities.

Site Selection for Your Laundry Facility: Location Matters!

Believe it or not, the location for your commercial laundry facility really does matter, especially if you are preparing to build your laundry room from the ground up, so-to-speak.

Ground floor is best. 

For optimal functionality, position the laundry room (or rooms) on the ground floor to ease equipment access and operations. Commercial washers and dryers weigh hundreds of pounds, so getting them downstairs into a basement or having to squeeze them into an elevator is not easy or ideal. Nor is it easy to swap them out when you need to upgrade them or replace them, but if you’re on the ground floor, installation or upgrading will go much more smoothly.

You’ll need access to an external wall.

The location should include an external wall for accommodating dryer exhausts and air intakes (which are mandatory for safety reasons), and avoiding costly fan systems that have to be ducted to an external location.

Commercial Laundry Planning Flooring Considerations

Flooring depends on the type of machines you’ll be using!!!

When we wrote about choosing the right kind of laundry equipment for your BC business, we went into detail about whether it’s advisable for a business to go with a hard-mount system or a soft-mount system. Each system has different flooring requirements and some require a cement base of a specific thickness.  

So, when considering the way your floor is going to be set up (concrete or not), it’s best to FIRST figure out what type of washer extractors you’ll need and THEN plan your flooring and plumbing layout. 

Here’s an example of why it’s important to choose the right machines and the right number of machines before you lay the floor of your commercial laundry room:

Say one of our laundry experts here at Haddon helps you figure out that you’ll need a few large capacity hard-mount washers and they will need to be bolted into a concrete floor. In this case, it would make much more sense to figure out where those machines will be placed in the laundry room BEFORE the plumbing under the floor is laid out. Otherwise, the laundry equipment installation techs risk drilling into the plumbing pipes when they are bolting the hard-mount washers to the floor. And that is a totally preventable, unnecessary setback and expense if you just do a little pre-planning first.

Also, it’s a good idea to avoid timber and underfloor heating in areas where heavy-duty machines will be installed. In cases where alternative flooring is unavoidable, you can always consult a structural engineer and consider adding a concrete plinth for machine stability.

Machine Selection: Don’t buy laundry machines that won’t work for your site!

Choosing the right kind of floor obviously goes hand in hand with laundry equipment selection, but there’s also more to it than just flooring requirements. 

In the above-mentioned resource article about choosing the right kind of laundry equipment for your business in BC, we went over the pros and cons of each type of commercial laundry machine, including the space needed for them, their overall efficiency, cost, and maintenance needs. All those will factor in to which type of machine you purchase for your industrial laundry needs. 

You also need to consider if machines in your laundry room are going to FIT. 

Are the laundry room facility doors large enough to get the machines in?
Make sure the width of your doors into and out of your commercial laundry room will not only allow the machines to get through for installation (& removal when replacing), but will also accommodate large laundry carts. If you’re unsure, have a Haddon salesperson come and measure everything to make sure they can match your room up with machines that will work for you. NOBODY wants to buy a bunch of machines only to have the service technicians show up for the install and inform you that they can’t get the machines into your laundry facility or that they can’t get the existing machines out!

How many machines do you need and will they all fit properly?
Not only does there need to be room in front of the machines for your laundry staff to move around, there ALSO has to be enough room BEHIND the machines for laundry technicians to be able to work on during maintenance and repairs. And room for chemicals to be hidden if you don’t want them out in the open. 

Is there also room for a large workspace for laundry staff to pile washables, fold them, etc?
Let’s face it, laundry piles up no matter how efficient laundry room staff is and there has to be a place to pile that laundry where it’s not going to get dirty, pick up lint, or get resoiled. PLUS, the staff needs working space to fold it, stack it, etc. The last thing you want to do is cram your commercial laundry operation so full that nobody has room to move—that will actually lower productivity and cause even bigger issues for your company.

Is there room for all the buckets of chemicals that will need to be hooked up to the machines—room enough so they won’t become a tripping hazard for your staff or maintenance people? 
Again, this may seem like a no-brainer, but we see it all the time where laundry rooms have been set up with nowhere to put the large buckets of chemicals so they get stacked in places where people trip over them or get laundry caught on them. It’s not a great situation. You definitely want to make sure that you have enough room for all the chemical equipment—pumps and cleaning products.

Utility Requirements for your Commercial Laundry Room

Do you have proper electrical for the types of machines you’ll be using?

If you choose machines that don’t work with your electrical setup while working on your laundry facilities planning, you’ll have to either get different machines that do or change the electrical setup. So, it’s best to choose the best machines for you that are also compatible with your electrical system. This will save you money and time spent going back to the drawing (or wiring) board, so-to-speak. Most commercial washers and dryers use either single phase or three-phase hook ups. Three-phase for washers and ironers, single or three-phase for dryers). 

Water supplies should offer sufficient flow and pressure. 

Some washers don’t feature built-in air gaps, which creates the need for separate backflow prevention. Make sure if the washer extractors you choose don’t have air gaps that you have the right backflow set up. 

Exhaust and Inlet Management in an Industrial Laundry Operation

Proper ventilation for dryers is a MUST DO when planning out your laundry operation!

Dryers should have appropriately sized exhaust ducts and air inlets, determined by the size and number of units. Gas dryer exhaust, though harmless, should be vented properly due to the odour it gives off. Boiler flues, carrying only combustion by-products, must be directed vertically and terminated safely.

Plus, if you live in a climate with cold winters, such as Northern BC or the Okanagan, you should be installing make-up air vents (that close automatically if your dryers aren’t venting) to prevent cold air coming in (when the machines aren’t running), which will end up freezing the pipes. 

Room Layout & Space Considerations for your Laundry Room

As we touched on above, it’s also a really good idea to designate separate ‘soiled/in’ and ‘clean/out’ doors during your laundry facility planning process. Allocate one-third of the space of the commercial laundry setup for wet processes (washing) and two-thirds for dry processes (drying and ironing), including sorting and storage areas. 

Lastly, if you run a commercial laundry in the BC healthcare or hospitality industry, you also may want to consider adding the Lux UV laundry system to your operations to take your washables to the highest level standards of cleanliness and disinfection, so you’ll need both wall space and space behind your machines to set that up.

What about Commercial Laundry Operations that just need upgrades?

This is another situation our Haddon technicians run into often—a BC business has an operating laundry room and needs a new machine or a new chemical setup, but there are structural or logistics issues to overcome. 

Here are a few issues that can really make an laundry room upgrade challenging:

• Buying machines before measuring them and then finding out that they won’t fit
• Buying machines that need to be mounted to the floor and finding out that the floor isn’t strong enough to hold the machines while they’re operating
• Not enough room to get behind the machine to work on it, either for a repair or for an installation or removal. If techs can’t get back there, they can’t do jack!
• Buying machines that have the wrong electrical hookups for what’s already installed, so they end up being incompatible and either need an electrical upgrade OR a change of machine.

How can we work around common laundry room upgrade issues?

The easiest way to avoid all of the above issues is to work closely with a commercial laundry expert, like our Haddon sales team and service technicians, to make sure that any upgrades being done (and any machines you are going to purchase) are going to be the right machine for your laundry room—the right size, the right mount, the right exhaust system, compatible electrical, etc. 

So, when you are ready for an upgrade, be prepared to have all the information needed to help your salesperson or tech understand what machines will work for you and be sure to ask the right questions to make sure all the bases are covered!

Be prepared for your laundry room upgrade by:

• Knowing the dimensions of your laundry room, where the plumbing is situated, what the current size of your equipment is and whether it’s mounted or not, etc. 
• Requesting a site visit BEFORE you purchase the equipment (if it’s possible) so the commercial laundry expert you’re working with can see for themself what size new machines need to be, how they need to be mounted, and what size of machines you can get through the doors, etc. If a site visit isn’t possible, no problem, send them a detailed layout of the currently industrial laundry setup so they can make sure they order you the correct machines. 

Now that we’ve covered all the basics to planning your commercial laundry facility for your BC business, get in touch with us today or call us at 1-888-442-3366 if you have any questions or if you’re ready to get started with planning an installation or an upgrade. You can also connect with us through our Haddon LinkedIn account—a great business to business connection for everyone!