TLDR: HLS Linen Services (50+ years serving Ontario healthcare) installed 50+ SonicAire fans across two facilities to automate lint control—the industry’s biggest fire hazard and operational challenge. CEO Rocco Romeo emphasizes that the system achieves three critical objectives: habitual control, daily execution, and integration into core processes.
Key Points:
• 50+ fans across Ottawa (40) and Toronto (10-12) facilities
• Lint control identified as biggest laundry industry challenge
• Overhead cleaning was labor-intensive with competing priorities
• Clean ceilings demonstrate operational excellence to customers
• System achieves habitual, daily, integrated dust control
Transcript:
My name is Rocco Romeo, I’m the CEO here at HLS linen services. We have two plants, one in the Ottawa area and one in the Toronto area. Our company has been in business for over 50 years now, providing linen and laundry services to health care facilities and long-term care facilities throughout most parts of Ontario.
Our job is to ensure that we provide a hygienically clean textile product to our customers. And making sure that all areas and surfaces that the linen comes into contact with are properly cleaned, properly disinfected, and free of any foreign matter.
One of our key things is to be as efficient as we can be, particularly of course, on the labor side, which is our biggest cost, and also on the automation side. So that’s why we’re always looking at areas and opportunities to increase automation.
One of the key things in running operations like ours is always lint. The cleaning of lint is probably one of the biggest challenges for any laundry operator. So, you really want to make sure that you have a system in place that you know is going to be able to handle that and not something that you need to worry about every day. Saying, “Oh, is my plant going to potentially catch fire because I haven’t taken care of the lint issue?” If you look at a lot of laundry fires, usually lint has been the cause of it. So, to me, it’s really important from a risk management perspective to say, how are you going to deal with lint?
So, when we opened up this plant in Ottawa back in 2007, one of the first things we looked at was the SonicAire fan. We saw the fan and we thought, what a great idea to deal with what was becoming a challenge with lint in certain areas of the plant. It’s easy to do all the floor stuff, but all the other stuff on top of equipment, and then in the rafters: those are challenging areas, and also extremely labor-intensive areas. If you leave it to your maintenance department, it may not get done, because there’s always other priorities at play. By having it this way, you’re basically automating that process of ensuring that managing lint and keeping the plant clean is now done on a regular basis.
I think we have about 40 or so here in the Ottawa plant. And we have, I believe, about 10 or 12 in our Toronto facilities, and they have been wonderful in terms of keeping the plant clean and keeping lint off particularly the rafters. So, it’s been a very good investment for our company.
When you’re dealing with a hazard, it needs to be habitual, it needs to be done daily, and it needs to be part of your core process. And I think by having the SonicAire fans, we were able to achieve all three of those objectives.
Our pride and joy in this facility is when people look up at our ceilings, they can see that they’re not full of lint. When people are looking at your facility from a potential customer perspective, or even a current customer perspective, they want to make sure that you’re taking all possible measures to ensure that they get hygienically clean product.
I truly am a big believer in SonicAire. Highly recommend them. And very grateful to have their product in our plant assisting us in our mission every day.
