We’ve all learned some hard lessons since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. At this point, we’ve all become well-practiced at ways to avoid community spread of this pathogen: social distancing, vigorous hand washing, and mask wearing in public are now the new normal. So is keeping your home and work areas as clean and disinfected as possible.
Thankfully, those of us in the animal care industry already had a leg up on all of this. With the heightened requirements of keeping our animal patients and guests safe during exams, procedures, and kenneling, many a local vet clinic were perfectly positioned to weather the storm that coronavirus brought down upon us all. Of course, even vet practices faced new challenges from COVID – and that’s where electrostatic disinfectant sprayers come in to save the day.
Disinfecting Challenges during Covid-19 for a Vet Practice
With many veterinary disinfectants capable of taking out some pretty tough pathogens already, animal care facilities did indeed have an advantage when it came to keeping their facilities both clean and disinfected. However, there were some serious challenges that even vet offices faced thanks to COVID, specifically because this was a human-borne disease, something that most veterinary care centers didn’t have protocols for.
This meant that vet offices had to pivot, and quickly, to find better and more efficient ways to disinfect areas of their facilities that were frequented by humans. Suddenly, being faced with the prospect of having to clean and disinfect pet parent waiting rooms, reception desks, and internal staff areas where there was little to no animal exposure meant a major sea change had to take place. It turns out that leveraging the power of an electrostatic disinfectant sprayer fits this bill perfectly.
How Electrostatic Sprayers Work
Just like how you would rub a balloon on your head as a child to build up a static charge and then marvel as the balloon would “stick” to the wall, electrostatic sprayers do the same thing – just on a different scale. Electrostatic sprayers, an example being the Protexus electrostatic sprayer, apply an even coating of liquid disinfectant that quickly and efficiently penetrates surfaces deeper and coats them more evenly than a simple spray bottle. This is made possible by the sprayer providing an electrostatic charge to the cleaning solution before it exits the spray nozzle giving it a 360 degree wrap around effect. Just spray from the front and it will disinfect the back.
How Electrostatic Sprays are Better at Disinfecting
There are so many different advantages to using electrostatic sprayers for disinfection. First, penetration and adherence are much higher than traditional cleaning methods thanks to the electrostatic charge of the cleaning solution. In fact, each charged droplet has an attractive force about 15 times greater than gravity! Additionally, the amount of time and energy saved by disinfecting with an electrostatic sprayer is considerable; a conventional sprayer might take up to 24 minutes to treat an 800-square foot room, while an electrostatic sprayer takes closer to 5 minutes.
Remember: the final goal of keeping your vet clinic as clean and disinfected as possible is to protect your animal patients and, in the time of COVID, their human parents as well. Throw in the need to keep you and your staff safe and healthy, and it becomes even more important to use the best cleaning and disinfection methods out there. It’s clear that, if you are looking for the best, then an electrostatic disinfectant sprayer is the ideal choice.