N3zones’ intelligent entrance cleaning promotes healthy buildings

When entering commercial and other buildings, people drag in dirt, water, sand and mud on their shoes. This can lead to a poor indoor environment, excessive wear on entrance mats and flooring, and high cleaning costs.

Normally, entrance mats are not cleaned on site. Instead, the mats are changed on a regular basis, transported for laundering and then returned. This results in high water consumption and considerable CO₂ emissions from transport.

Moreover, with smart buildings becoming more commonplace, readily available data on indoor air quality and cleaning status is becoming increasingly sought-after.

The N3zones clean-off system features durable matting made out of recycled yarn from discarded fishing nets. It also includes a special vacuum cleaner, N3evo, which is fitted with IoT sensors.

The sensors are tracked by the N3Smart IoT ecosystem for automatic surveillance of cleaning status. N3Smart features a map and status KPIs for all cleaning sites, as well as a management system in which the user creates a location and an entry zone to be monitored, setting the zone size, expected cleaning time and KPI notification reports.

The IoT system also uses indoor positioning technology. Each time the vacuum goes in and out of a zone it is registered in the system. Cleaning is monitored according to the KPIs, and notifications are automatically sent to the administrator of a location if there are discrepancies in expected cleaning.

The N3zones clean-off system improves the indoor environment for building occupants through more efficient and precise cleaning. The system is more sustainable than traditional systems with washable mats, with much lower water consumption and transport emissions.

The N3Smart IoT ecosystem will be tuned to provide building cleaning status in accordance with the INSTA 800 Nordic cleaning standard.

N3Smart is based on the new NB-IoT Narrowband 4/5G technology and Bluetooth BLE 5.0 to keep costs down. It can also be used with any cleaning robot or machine, in addition to N3evo vacuums, and gives building owners insight into the real utilisation of each unit.

The global entrance matting market is expected to reach over USD 6.7 billion by 2020. The N3zones Group estimates that its potential market comprises six million entrances in two million buildings in Norway and Sweden alone.

The N3zones clean-off zone system was developed in collaboration with the Norwegian Asthma and Allergy Association. At present, 19 500 systems have been installed in schools, nursery schools, hospitals, office buildings, and retail and production facilities in Norway and Sweden.

The N3Smart system will soon be expanded with weather data as well as indoor environmental sensors that will provide data on factors such as dust levels, VOCs, temperature, humidity, and more, enabling improved algorithms in the IoT ecosystem. This will give building owners and other stakeholders new insight into how such factors affect the indoor environment.