Cylindrical vs. Disc Floor Scrubbers - What's the Difference?

Disc Scrubbing:

Disc scrubbers wash, or strip wax from the floor. Disk machines offer easy to change, variably aggressive, pads or brushes. These features make disk scrubbers ideal for retail applications where pads are not only inexpensive, but offer a great deal of surface contact for scuff mark control and floor shine. When aggressive pads are coated with the stripped wax, they can be conveniently thrown away. For industrial applications, disk brushes often make sense because they can accept greater down pressure than cylindrical brooms, and heavily soiled floors benefit from heavy down pressure. Example: A demonstration person can stand on a disk brush (in our case this is up to 250 pounds of pressure) and the brush bristles do not deflect. For this reason, your see them on machines that offer great down pressure such as the Advance and American Lincoln combustion engine cleaning machines. But you will note, these combination machines still include separate dry sweeper brooms to collect the solid debris.

Cylindrical Scrubbing:

A cylindrical scrub brush system will (wet) sweep small amounts of solid debris into a removable tray while also washing the floor. You eliminate the manual pre sweeping of your factory or warehouse floor for greater productivity and fewer clogs in the squeegee section of the scrubber. Plus there is often no need for an additional separate sweeper or even a combination machine when a cylindrical machine will do the job. Cylindrical scrubbers usually turn their brushes at a speed that is three times the rotation of a disk brush. This will often offset the greater surface area advantage that disk scrub decks offer. Cylindrical scrub brushes do keep less bristle surface in contact with the floor, but the revolving line of bristles will rotate on the floor with three times the rotation frequency of disk brush bristles.

Which is better?
Both will clean your floor!

Pro Disk: Disc scrub brushes have the advantage on the issue of lower initial cost and simplicity of maintenance. A disk brush will last longer and a replacement brush usually will cost less. Cylindrical decks (as an option) will typically increase your scrubber cost. Plus it helps to add side brooms to cylindrical systems to steer the debris into the path of the of the scrub deck and out of the outer edges of the squeegee.

Pro Cylindrical: Cylindrical scrub decks eliminate the need to pre sweep your floor and may save the expense of true combination sweeper/scrubber machines or separate dry sweepers.