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I'm Mike, product manager here at Powr-Flite, and today we're going to be talking about automatic scrubbers, specifically our Predator 17, but just a little bit about auto scrubbers. They save a tremendous amount of labor and do a better job cleaning. With a mop and bucket, you're basically taking dirt and spreading it onto a different location and recontaminating over and over with your mopping bucket. With an automatic scrubber, you have continuous flow of fresh solution that's recovered into the recovery tank. The labor is saved by, it's really a self-contained unit that's traditionally done with two or more individuals. Back here you'll see a floor machine with a solution tank, a wet drive vacuum with a squeegee mounted on it that's doing the job of an automatic scrubber, except it's self-contained in one unit and does the job very much quicker, very much more effective. What the auto scrubber does then is it does the job quicker, freeing up time for the operators to do the jobs that they usually can't get to the cleaning of the windows sills, cleaning of the metal, getting on baseboard cleanings. Just more time is spent to do the job they have to do.

So with that being said, we will get into some of the features and benefits of the Predator 17. As the name indicates, 17 inches, 17 inch brush or pad that's actually doing the agitation on the floor. You can look for as far as effective square footage, Predator 17 will do approximately 13 to 15,000 square feet per hour. Quite a bit of efficiencies as far as coverage. It's a battery unit, and what that does is it frees the operator away from an electrical cable. There's no more looking for an outlet or skipping rope and having that get into your way, now you've got battery power. The operator is able to get in there without having to worry about the electrical cable.

What it means as far as labor savings, if you had a 17 inch cord electric machine and a 17 inch battery machine, the battery machine is going to do the job 30% quicker and that's a huge consideration as far as getting the job done. You have a solution and a recovery tank. Here is your solution and that's a 12 gallon solution tank, and we always ask that you put in water first, chemical next. No need to put in hot water. Chemicals are made today that they work very efficiently with cold water. That is then dispensed by the operator's controls over the brush itself and what they're called is shower feed brushes, and that's located at the front of the machine and it's enclosed in a housing that acts as a splash guard. Contains the splashing, keeps the solution within the cleaning chamber, and that is your pad driver.

Clutch plate holes on the top. That's the shower feed aspect that I talked about. The solution is then dispensed through the bristles that grab onto the pad and the solution then comes through the pad. Now the operator has a choice of using different types of pads depending on the job. White, a very soft, not aggressive, red, green, brown, up to black, black, very aggressive used for the stripping process, or if it's an irregular surface, you can use a brush and the brush gets into grout lines and such.

The pad driver is raised by raising and lowering to the floor. When the pad is on the floor, the actual motion of the pad itself pulls the machine along. It's called pad assist, just like when you run a floor machine, how the floor machine moves on its own. It's the same concept with a pad assist machine. When the solution is agitated and cleaning the floor, the solution comes back and is captured by the squeegee system. That is what's hooked up to your vacuum source. Your vacuum source is connected with your squeegee system. This handle raises and lowers the squeegee to the floor. The squeegee comes off for service and cleaning. After operation, you want to take it off, rinse water through it and set the squeegee where it can dry overnight.

The squeegee system uses two blades. The front blade lets the water through the back blade is actually the wiping blade. Now these will wear over time and when they do wear down, you've got four sides that you can replace for wear. You can, once the edge wears down, you could flip this one time and then you could flip it that way. So as the rubber wears down, you'll be able to service that. You have two adjustments on the squeegee system. The first one here is this dial, and what that does is it adjusts the camber or the pitch of the squeegee to make sure that the back blade is wiping properly. Also have your other adjustments right here, and by raising and lowering the wheels, that will adjust how much squeegee pressure is being put down on the floor. You will have different surfaces. It may be different working on a quarry tile or a VCT floor, so you can make adjustments for pressure simply by doing that. Once you do that pressure, you're pretty much set and ready to go.

Okay, the water, then the dirty water is now recovered by the squeegee, pulled up into the vacuum system, comes up the hose and drops into the recovery tank. Right here we have our cover to seal the vacuum and also inside here is a shutoff ball, so if the solution tank fills up, it will raise the ball and stop airflow from being pulled into the vac motor. That saves the life of your vac motor. This is also foam sensitive, but we highly recommend to use a chemical that's low foaming or if the tank does fill up with a little froth and foam, you could even put it in a defoaming chemical, which will knock it down.

We've already talked about the raising, the lowering of the squeegee, how the vacuum system gets pulled up from the squeegee system. And then right here we have our clean water dump. This pops off. You bring it down to a floor drain and dump the clean water.

I'd like to point out to you a very important aspect of an auto scrubber, and that's the cleaning of the recovery tank. You want to make sure that you clean it all properly. If you let the solution sit in the tank for extended period of times, it starts to get very bad smelling and a bad smell is interpreted to an unclean facility. This is very, very easy to clean. The 11 gallon solution tank has a dump hose. You're able to open that up, bring it down to a floor drain. Clean water, dumping in the solution, and the beauty of this is you could actually take this tank off for real deep cleaning if it's necessary.

We also recommend when you're charging the machine overnight to leave that vacuum port open so it allows, evaporation, allows the machine to dry properly. That will help with the maintenance of your product. Just like your vehicle at home, if you keep your car clean, there's a good chance that you're checking things like the oil level, all the tires, aspects like that. When you work around your machine, clean it up, you're able to identify the areas that could possibly need service and maintenance.

Here's your control panel and we have switches. First of all, your ignition switch turns it on and that will show you an indicator as far as how much battery life is on there. As that decreases down through the green lights, it'll get to a point when it's needing a charge, it'll get to red and that's telling you to get it back to its battery charging station. Also an indicator that shows you here how many hours the machine has been used, and then three switches on-off for vacuum, on-off for the brush revolution and on-off for solution dispensing. Now you just want to use as much solution as necessary. Too little solution will streak the floor. Too much solution will have solution dragging from outside the squeegee. That's all adjustable right here from maximum solution all the way down to no solution. So we recommend to go on the center and just watch when you're performing with the machine to make sure that it's being contained by the squeegee.

The machine's footprint is on center wheels, and what that does for the operator is that they're able to turn within its own radius. That means you get into a hallway where it could be difficult to turn the machine around. It just turns within its own space, making it very easy for the operator to make turns down the floor away.

For access for the battery, you take off your two vacuum sources, take off your tank, that's nice for cleaning, and now you've got access for your batteries. For charging disconnect and plug into an automatic charger. And the rule of thumb is two hours charge for every hour's use, so it's probably going to charge between six to eight hours overnight. It's a smart charger, so then when the machine is totally charged, it will go to trickle charge. Basically shutting off the charging to the batteries. These are wet cell batteries. You'll want to pop these lids off and take a look at the cells, make sure that the fluid levels are over the plates and the batteries, and you'll get more instruction on that with the operator's manual.

Well, hopefully the information we discussed today will help you make your buying decision if you're looking at an auto scrubber or if you'll have one of our auto scrubbers already. This may be helpful into learning some of the finer points of operation and maintenance of your product.

Using Powr-Flite's Predator 17 Video