Video transcript:

We’ve all walked into an aged care or retirement centre and the furniture is filthy. What do we do about that? What is the best way to keep the aged care upholstery fabric clean?

One of the first things we can do is ensure that the aged care upholstery fabric we are selecting on a project is fit for purpose.

There are 4 things that we really need to look for when choosing an aged care upholstery fabric as far as functionality is concerned:

1. Does it have antimicrobial properties?
2. The fire retardancy of the fabric.
3. The rub rate of the fabric, so the abrasion rate; how long it’s going to last.
4. And lastly, if it’s waterproof and/or cleanability.

So let’s just do a little demo and I’ll show you. This is a fabric that is waterproof fabric; it’s a Crypton fabric. There are other types and brands on the market. There’s Zircon fabric as well which is a waterproof fabric but this one here is a Crypton fabric and I want to just show you by selecting the right fabric what that means for your facility and the ability for your people to keep it clean.

So here we have some of the common enemies of furniture fabric; we have Coca-Cola soft drink and we have some wine and let’s do a little demonstration here and show you exactly how that works when we pour it onto the fabric and mop it up and show you that it cleans up beautifully.

Ok so here we have some lovely Coca-Cola. Let’s pour some of this onto the seat and you’ll see that it’s pooling very nicely on the seat. We’ll leave it there for a moment and I’ll show you how simply with a bit of paper towel, we’ll mop that up without a trace. A nice white fabric as you can see on this chair would normally leave a lot of marks. We’ll mop that up nicely. Simply wipe it off the chair and there you have it. All gone. Back to where it was originally.

Let’s try something a little bit different. Let’s try something a little worse than Coca-Cola. Let’s try some wine. Red wine, of course, is the enemy of lots of furniture items including timber if you leave it on there on your bench tops but with this fabric, it’s designed specifically for this sort of thing and again we simply mop up the wine and with a couple of wipe overs, you’ll find that is all gone. Again, back to where we started from.

So choosing fabric with the right functional characteristics is just so important for the health and well-being of your residents and their families.