The Wet Shift Nobody Wants: 7,000 m² of Poultry Plant Floor, Scrubbed for a 21-Month Payback

A poultry processing plant has the hardest cleaning brief we size fleets for: a wet, fat-loaded floor, a fixed slot between the last bird and the pre-op inspection, and the one shift in the building that nobody wants to work. This composite plant automated 30% of its sanitation night — the floor-scrub pass, and only the floor-scrub pass — with three Gausium Scrubber 75P units, and landed a 21-month payback. The interesting part is what it didn't buy: three cheaper fleets clear the same floor in the same slot — one of them for about A$279,000 less on hardware — and every one of them pays back in under a year.

The brief

The plant runs six production days a week. Sanitation starts when the line stops and has to be signed off before the first shift walks in. Miss the window and production starts late; rush it and the swabs come back wrong. That squeeze — not headcount cost — is why the site went looking at machines.

• 9,400 m² of hard floor, of which ~7,000 m² is genuinely robot-reachable
• A 5-hour floor-scrubbing slot inside a ~7.5-hour sanitation shift
• Segregated hygiene zones: a machine that leaves a zone has to be washed down before it comes back in
• Soil is rendered fat and protein, not dust — the failure mode is a smeared pass, not a missed one

The night, in order

Sanitation is not one task, and only one part of it is a robot's job.

The shortlist

We size and rank every brand the same way: manufacturer spec midpoint × 0.6 spec-to-real derate (0.45 where the maker publishes a theoretical maximum rather than a practical range) × 0.85 in-window duty. No brand gets scored on numbers the others don't publish.

The Scrubber 50 Pro is the one row that doesn't belong in the slot: four units clear the area on capacity, but its 3-hour runtime forces a mid-pass recharge, so the pass runs ~5 h 50 min of wall clock. Everything else here finishes inside the five hours.

The chosen fleet is the most expensive answer on this list — A$279,000 more on hardware than two CenoBots L50s, and three times a four-unit CC1 Pro fleet that clears the same floor in the same slot and pays back in well under a year. It doesn't win on tanks either: the L50 carries a larger recovery tank than it (55 L vs 50 L), and the Marvel a much larger one again.

So the case for it rests on three things the throughput column can't show.

1. The soil is fat, not dust. The Scrubber 75P is the only machine in our catalogue that publishes a dedicated oil-cleaning mode, and it publishes a 45 kg brush-deck pressure. Only the Marvel publishes a higher figure (55 kg); PUDU and CenoBots publish no deck-pressure figure for their scrubbers in the spec data we hold. On rendered fat, deck pressure decides whether you get one pass or three — and three passes fit no slot.
2. A dock that empties itself. The 75P refills and discharges automatically; the two cheaper big-tank rivals don't. On a floor that loads the recovery tank fast, a machine that drains itself beats a bigger tank somebody has to walk over and empty — and in a segregated plant every manual trip means leaving a zone and washing down before re-entry.
3. What the coverage figure is made of. The 75P's 700–1,400 m²/h is a published practical range with confirmed specs. The two-unit L50 and Marvel fleets are sized off theoretical maxima, and our catalogue flags the L50's specs as unconfirmed — sources disagree on its coverage. Two machines sized off an "up to" number, with no spare, on a slot that cannot slip, is a different risk class from three.

None of that is free. It costs A$279,000 more in hardware than the cheapest fleet that clears the floor on paper, and a plant with lighter soil, a looser clock, or crew to spare for manual dock trips should price the L50 and the Marvel properly before accepting this answer.

What we could not verify

Gausium publishes no IP rating and no working-temperature range for the Scrubber 75P in the spec data we hold — and the asymmetry is worth stating plainly: PUDU publishes IPX4 for the CC1 and CC1 Pro, and every other machine on this shortlist, the 75P included, publishes nothing. The machine we specified has less published water protection than one we passed over.

So we planned it conservatively. It does not run during high-pressure wash-down, it is parked outside the zone while the crew foams, and it enters no cold room — the chilled store and blast chiller sit outside the 7,000 m² we sized, because a machine publishing no working-temperature range doesn't get planned into one. It runs a wet floor, not a floor being hosed — and the zone wash-down in the argument above is the plant's hygiene procedure, not a rating-backed capability of any machine here. If a vendor tells you their machine survives live wash-down, get the rating in writing on the purchase order — an unpublished spec is not a rating.

The money

Three units at A$131,164 apiece come to A$393,500; mapping, hygiene-zone commissioning and the dock drain tie-in added ~A$16,500, for ~A$410,000 upfront.

On the manual side, 7,000 m² at our planner's 400 m²/h wet-clean rate is 17.5 labour-hours a night. The robots don't remove all of it: supervision is booked at 8 minutes per robot cleaning hour, so three units running ~4.4 hours each keep about 1.75 hours a night of human time. Net displaced is 15.75 hours a night at a fully-loaded night sanitation rate of A$52/h — about A$819 a night, or A$21,294 across a 26-night month. Take off ~A$1,800 for detergent, water, power and service and the net is ≈A$19,500 a month.

Would it work at your plant?

Three units, ~4 h 20 min, 38 minutes of headroom — one battery each, because 4.4 hours of running sits inside the rated 5-hour runtime, with the 5-hour recharge falling in the 19 hours the plant isn't scrubbing. Two 75P units would need about 6 h 30 min, longer than both the slot and a charge.

The wage rate moves this more than anything: at our planner's default rather than a night sanitation rate, the same fleet takes about 33 months.

• Size your own site in the Fleet & ROI Planner — floor area, window and wage rates.
• Or tell us about your plant and we'll send a vendor-neutral shortlist with indicative pricing.