Swiftclean – The Origin Story
How much do you know about the early days of Swiftclean?
After leaving college, Gary Nicholls and Paul Argles, both from entrepreneurial family backgrounds, looked for ideas to start a business – they had a mutual friend who sold tube cleaning equipment, but he told them that many people were looking for someone to carry out a tube cleaning service – they didn’t want to carry out the cleaning themselves.
Recognising this demand, the entrepreneurs decided to set up a business to meet it!
They placed an advert in H&V News in Dec 1982 and their first job was ironically cleaning a sectional boiler at North Finchley Fire Station, which didn’t contain heat transfer tubes.
Some of their other early jobs consisted of:
• Cleaning tubular heat exchangers in a local Basildon based yogurt production business
• Tube cleaning in a sulphur refining unit at the Mobil Oil refinery in Coryton – they had to drill out the cooled and solidified sulphur from the tubes
• Cleaning of sugar beet refining heat exchanger tubes at British Sugar in Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds
This work, being specialised, led to Gary and Paul receiving an enquiry from a company called Barrier Air Conditioning to carry out some duct cleaning. As they already had rotary brushes from their tube cleaning work, they gradually developed new techniques and equipment more suitable to this work.
They advertised and wrote articles in the industry press and then offered a free ductwork survey using a borescope to 100 hospitals. Ten hospitals accepted and they were shocked by what they found. A considerable accumulation of debris was found to have formed in these healthcare ventilation systems. One of the hospital ventilation systems inspected was the Royal Free in the London Borough of Camden, the air intake chambers were so large that a double-decker bus would have fitted in them!
Their first actual ductwork cleaning job was cleaning the supply ducts serving the British Airways cabin crew canteen at Heathrow Airport which they vacuumed and cleaned by hand. At this time there were no regulations for cleaning ductwork, and they came across ductwork in all states. There were only a few other duct cleaning companies around at this time.
As they gained more experience, they realised that there was a clear need for not only air hygiene services but also water hygiene services. At that time, the conditions found in commercial domestic water tanks were often horrendous, decomposing dead pigeons or squirrels were commonly found in the communal water storage tanks.
In addition to this, in 1985 there was a major outbreak of Legionnaires’ Disease at Stafford District General Hospital, a total of 68 confirmed cases were treated in the hospital and 22 of these patients died. As a result of this and a few years later in 1991, the HSE published a guide known as HSG70, this created a demand for water tanks to be inspected and kept clean. This was why Swiftclean introduced a water tank cleaning, refurbishment, and disinfection service to meet the demand to improve conditions in storage tanks.
Swiftclean (UK) Ltd was formed in 1991 and won its largest contract – The fire decontamination of Minster Court – a £1.8 million contract completed in just six months.
In 1996, as a result of a new Regulation coming into force requiring ventilation systems to be cleaned as appropriate, the few companies that were carrying out ductwork cleaning were invited to a meeting at the HVAC and they formed the first Ventilation Hygiene Technical Working Group. This group formed a steering committee which Gary was invited into, and they wrote the first guide to good practice for the cleanliness of ventilation systems – TR/17 – published in 1998.
Around this time in the USA, vacuum tests were already being used but only to assess if ductwork was sufficiently clean after a cleaning project. The HVCA Working Group decided that these tests, measuring the weight of deposits over a test area, could be used to ascertain when it was ‘appropriate’ for ductwork to be cleaned and this was incorporated into the first TR/17 as the vacuum test (VT).
They also introduced a new second method to test if it was appropriate to clean a ventilation system, which was measuring the thickness of the deposit layer, this was known as the deposit thickness test (DTT). Gary had been aware of the deposit thickness test method for testing dry paint layers and had introduced this to the steering committee who innovated with the method to develop the test to be suitable for the guidance required.
In 1997 a major fire occurred in a kitchen extraction system serving a Burger King Unit at Heathrow Airport Terminal 1, causing a closure of the terminal. Consequential loss claims were reported as being as high as £200 million. This highlighted the level of risk to insurers of buildings that housed commercial kitchen extraction systems.
A second edition of the guide TR17 was published in 2002, this included a much-expanded section relating to kitchen extract systems. It introduced a test method specifically for measuring the thickness of grease deposits in kitchen extract ducts, the test was known as the Wet Film Thickness Test (WFTT).
Gary had brought this test method into the HVCA technical steering group as the testing tool, the wet film testing comb was a device that Swiftclean had used in water storage tank refurbishment projects to test that the thickness of the wet paint layer was sufficient. It developed into the wet film thickness test used today by hundreds of businesses to help control the fire risk in kitchen extract systems throughout the UK.
The guide was re-published for the third time in 2005 with improvements and included aspects of DWTM2 – Internal cleanliness of newly installed ductwork installations. TM2 published in 1991 was essentially a guide to limit the contamination of ductwork during construction. The 2005 publication was re-named TR/19 – Internal Cleanliness of Ventilation Systems and gave guidance on the protection, delivery and installation of ventilation systems, sitting alongside the guidance for cleaning of them.
With Gary still at the helm after over 40 years, Swiftclean has continued to go from strength to strength, winning numerous awards and becoming one of the leading air and water hygiene companies in the UK.
