What is being accepted, and why it needs criteria
Machine guards and housings are the surfaces a cleaning crew touches most and specifies least. They are also the surfaces where a cleaning decision does the most damage: guarding carries safety markings and warning labels, housings carry printed instruction plates and touch-screen faces, and both enclose bearings, sensors and electrical enclosures that must not be driven wet. A facility that wants this work repeated consistently — whether done in-house or by a contractor — needs written acceptance criteria for the result on the guard, for the condition of the guard afterwards, and for the record proving the work was done.
1. Define the population before the criteria
Acceptance is meaningless against an undefined list. Inventory the items in scope, tagged to the line or machine: fixed guarding panels and their frames, interlocked doors, hinged covers, belt and chain guards, machine housings and fairings, enclosures with view panels, operator consoles and HMI faces, and the horizontal flanges on top of machines where soil collects. For each item note the material and finish — powder-coated steel, stainless, polycarbonate or acrylic view panel, painted sheet, anodised aluminium — and whether a label, marking or seal is present. That single sheet becomes the acceptance register, and it is also what tells the crew which items may not be washed.
2. Cleanliness criteria: how the surface is judged
Write criteria an inspector can apply without debate. Practical options:
- Visual at a defined distance and lighting: no visible deposit on the outer face; no film along panel edges, seams and hinge lines.
- Touch check on horizontal flanges and top surfaces: no grit or oily film detectable with a white cloth drawn once across the surface.
- Marking legibility: every safety marking, warning label and instruction plate readable, with no lifting edge or blurred text.
- View panels clear of haze and streaks, so the operator can actually see the process through them.
- Dry and safe on handover: no standing water, no residue that makes a walkway or a grip surface slippery.
Grade the criteria by zone rather than applying one standard everywhere. Guarding beside a food or cleanroom-adjacent process, and consoles that operators touch continuously, deserve a tighter standard than the outer face of a guard in a machining aisle.
3. Condition criteria: the guard must be undamaged
A clean guard that has lost a label or has a crazed view panel is a failed job, and the crew should not be paid for it. Add condition checks to acceptance: no lifting or dissolved labels; no blistering, crazing or dulling of acrylic and polycarbonate panels; no paint lifted at drilled edges or fastener heads; no water ingress evidence inside enclosures, behind HMI faces or at cable glands; interlocks, switches and their actuators undisturbed; guards refitted squarely with all fasteners in place and any removable panel returned to its correct position. Confirm the material limits with the machine manufacturer before choosing a method — heat and moisture are the two variables that damage guards, and the manufacturer, not the cleaning supplier, owns that answer.
4. Process criteria: how the work must have been done
Acceptance should cover the method, because the method is what prevents the damage listed above. Set the rules in the specification: the machine section isolated and tagged before cleaning starts; no steam or pressure directed at bearings, way covers, encoder and sensor faces, electrical enclosures, or belt and chain drives; working distance and mode fixed by a trial on your own equipment and recorded on the procedure sheet; no cleaning with guards removed unless a named person has re-validated the guarding afterwards; run-off contained and routed to an approved disposal, not down a general drain.
Where a steam machine is used, its published data tells you the energy in play — a fixed unit such as the Fixed Steam Cleaning Machine PowerDe HW02 is listed at 160° steam temperature and 0.8 MPa vapour pressure, while the Hand Pushed Steam Cleaning Machine PowerDe HMW3 page records dry- and wet-steam modes, 4.5 kW heating power and a 50 L tank but does not publish temperature or pressure. Ask for the missing values and set the working distance from a witnessed trial, not from a mode name.
5. The acceptance procedure and its record
- Agree, in advance, the sample of items inspected per zone — for example every guard on one line, or a fixed percentage across the site.
- Inspect with a named inspector and the crew leader present, against the register, with photographs at agreed positions.
- Record each item as pass, remedial or failed, with the reason and the re-inspection date.
- Tie remedial work to the contractor at no cost, and repeat failures to a re-brief or a change of method.
- Keep the register current as machines change; a stale register is how a newly fitted guard escapes the specification.
Writing the criteria into the contract or work order
Put four documents under one control: the register of guards and housings with materials noted; the method specification with exclusions and the trial-derived working distance; the acceptance sheet with the visual, touch, legibility and condition checks; and the sign-off record with date, inspector and photographs. For in-house crews the same four items become a training document and a monthly audit. And if the task recurs across a site, raise it with the equipment supplier as a configuration question rather than a consumables purchase — PowerDe presents itself as an intelligent cleaning equipment manufacturer with customised configurations, and the full Cleaning Equipment Series listing shows the mobile and fixed options whose accessories and modes have to match the register you have written.
