Conference 2006 Report

By Ken Wainwright

This year's NCCA Conference and AGM, held at the Leicester Racecourse, has been hailed a success by visitors and exhibitors alike. The facilities at the venue were excellent and were ably supported by a superb service from our hosts.

The conference offered three diverse seminars, which held our interest and confirmed for many of us that we are never too old to stop learning. The day started with Julie Roberts of Chemspec Europe enlightening us of the business opportunities to be found in the Blood and Trauma Cleaning side of our industry. Some not-so-pretty photographs highlighted the type of environment that a trauma technician is often exposed to. Julie then outlined the Health and Safety considerations, staffing issues and equipment and chemical requirements relevant to this line of work. What became evident throughout the seminar was that trauma scene cleaning offers great opportunities to the carpet-cleaning technician wishing to diversify from the core business.

After a short break, Mike Hall of Envirodri presented his seminar about Dry Powder Extraction Carpet Cleaning. But his offering wasn't quite what we expected. With most of us being familiar with Dry Extraction, Mike spent much of his time on the often overlooked and taken-for-granted process of vacuum cleaning. By delving into the different types of vacuum cleaner, how, where and why they work, along with their pros and cons, a whole new world of vacuuming techniques and efficiency was presented to us. Naturally, efficient pre-vacuuming makes other aspects of the cleaning process so much easier.

Following an excellent buffet lunch, we assembled for the final seminar of the day. Nick Vousden-White of Solution UK gave the first public presentation of their new generation of micro-splitting formulae called M Power. This new product, it was explained, is so different to anything we had seen before that an explanation of how it worked would help us to understand how to use it to best effect. M Power is the first of a whole family of colloidal cleaning products to be launched in the near future. The first of these additions is a sanitising cleaner named Stayclean, which was also presented to us.

Accompanying the Conference, we also had a mini-exhibition, which was well received. As well as Chemspec Europe, Envirodri and Solution UK, other exhibitors were Host Von Schrader, Truvox, Prochem Europe, Dry Fusion, NCCA and Woolsafe.

The afternoons AGM completed what proved to be an exciting, entertaining and rewarding day's education. I feel sure that others who attended will agree.

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