If you’ve ever sent a kid to kindergarten, you’ve probably encountered the back-to-school flu. Schools can provide the prime environment for germs to spread rapidly. While most standard sanitizers are effective against the common germs encountered in the classroom, locker and lunchroom, they are rarely free of toxins. Schools need a non-toxic, reliable disinfectant that won’t present a risk to their students.

Mike Draper, Custodial Services Manager for the Box Elder School District (pictured, left), switched his schools to hypochlorous acid in September. His decision to trade out toxic cleaning chemicals for hypochlorous acid was based on his research into aqueous ozone, another cleaning agent the district uses.

“I was apprehensive about making it [hypochlorous acid] at first, but then I realized it’s no more difficult than changing out a concentrate on a chemical dispenser.”

Draper currently has seven machines operating in six of the 23 schools in his district and hopes to have a machine in every secondary school. The custodians fill a five-gallon bucket with hypochlorous acid and then use that to fill individual spray bottles. These bottles get distributed throughout the classrooms, providing teachers with easy access to a non-toxic hand and surface sanitizer.

While some custodians were understandably skeptical about the new solution, Draper says the transition from traditional cleaning products has been fairly easy. There were doubts about whether or not hypochlorous acid was as effective as the claims said it was, but Draper took a hands-on approach to overcoming those doubts.

Over a period of several months, he took the time to do his own stability and
efficacy tests, even purchasing ORP and ATP meters to test surfaces. Draper placed different concentrations of hypochlorous in various bottles, in sunlight and out of sunlight, and measured the chlorine degradation over time. He even ran a pilot test in a school. Cory Ballard (pictured, right), the head custodian at Bear River Middle School, headed the first hypochlorous trial before Draper introduced the new cleaning protocol to the rest of the district. His investments paid off—the data from his own tests coincided with what he was reading from sources online, and the positive feedback from the trial run by Ballard helped to convince his custodians.

One of the unexpected benefits the custodians found from using hypochlorous acid is its ability to neutralize odors.

“One day we had a kid come to school who had been sprayed by a skunk,” Draper said. “The entire locker room stunk. The custodian fogged it with hypochlorous using a ULV cold fogger and within 20 minutes the smell completely went away and never came back.”

They had the same results with a classroom that had a strange, persistent smell. After trying several other methods with no luck, they fogged it with hypochlorous and found the odor was completely gone. 

“Some of my custodians now say it’s the best thing ever, they’ll never go back to using something else,” Draper said.