Xeros Technology : IoT Laundry Helps North Shore Hotel Reduce Water Costs and Downtime

Xeros customer, Chad Hanson, the general manager of North Short Hotel located in Danvers, MA, was recently featured in the IoT Journal where he talked about his experience with the Xeros laundry system. Below are excerpts from that article.

The two machines on which the Danvers, Mass., hotel relied for daily laundering of sheets, towels, kitchen linens and so forth were the same age as the hotel: 20 years. And they were showing their age.

'We were having to get service on them all the time, so our service costs were through the roof,' Hanson says. Plus, the old machines were huge water hogs, using 100 to 120 gallons for every load. With water costs rising, this added to the financial strain. 'We had to get new machines.'

Hanson happened to see a flier for a company called Xeros, which claimed to have a new approach to laundry. Its proprietary machines use small plastic beads to help agitate and clean textiles, allowing it to significantly reduce water consumption.

'I thought it sounded too good to be true,' Hanson says.

Xeros machines are instrumented with sensors that track a range of metrics, including water flow, the amount of detergent used, and the machine's uptime. An integrated gateway device uses the hotel's internet connection to transmit all of this data, along with diagnostic information that tracks the machine's performance and includes any alerts related to potential malfunctions, to Xeros' cloud-based servers. Customers access this data through a web-based portal.

Hanson says that he receives monthly usage reports. 'It gives me the number of wash cycles and a daily and monthly breakdown so I can see X loads are being done,' he explains.

'In the busy summer months,' Hanson says, 'I can see that we run 15 to 16 loads each day in each machine and I can see which cycles are being run,' what percentage of loads are sheets, how many are towels, etc. If an employee notices that a load of heavily soiled items-such as cleaning cloths from the kitchen, for example-needs to be re-washed, he or she can re-run the same load by choosing 'reclaim.' This appears on the usage report as well. If it were to happen frequently, management might choose to investigate, in order to determine whether there was a business process issue or if the frequent reclaim cycles were linked to a problem with the machine's performance.

The reports can also be used to match labor hours to productivity. 'So say a site, like a hotel ownership group, with decentralized management wants to know when machines are starting and stopping and the machine utilization rate,' said Jonathan Benjamin at Xeros. 'If the shift starts at 7 AM and the machines doesn't start until 9 AM, then there is a problem.'

'We've never had the laundry room metered on its own, so I did not know exactly how much we are spending on laundry [with the old machines]. But now I can see our [water] usage on a month-over-month basis,' Hanson says, adding that he can work this into the metric, known as cost per occupied room, that hoteliers use to measure cost. 'Our cost our occupied room has gone down, but the cost of water has gone up. And if we still had the older machines, we would be using far more water, so there is no doubt that we've had water savings.' Add to that a major reduction in maintenance costs, compared to the old machines.

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