During winter and amidst a period of spring cleaning, your heavy-duty entrance mat is often an unsung hero that saves your business a lot of time, money and liability.
Aside from being designed to avoid slips and trips at reception, even whilst frequently assaulted with mud, dirt, debris and rainwater, entrance mats also subtly help to reduce the risk of slip hazards throughout your office building, saving considerable sums in cleaning costs in the process.
This has been true throughout the history of the doormat, but is particularly true in an age where every aspect of your business needs to reflect its overall underlying vision and values.
With that in mind, here is a guide to entrance mat length, what factors can affect it and how you can make it fit the aesthetic of your building.
How Long Does An Entrance Mat Need To Be?
Historically, entrance mat standards have recommended that entrance mats should be roughly around 2.1 metres (roughly seven feet). However, is this enough to stop water and mud from getting into your building and causing your floors to become a slip hazard?
According to a study conducted by the Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL), the answer is a resounding no; depending on how many people are expected to enter or exit your building, a 2.1-metre mat is between half and a fifth of the size really needed to keep your building clean and safe.
Here are the recommendations from the HSL study:
- Low traffic areas, defined as having less than 80 people enter or exit a building per hour, require between three and four metres of matting to stop noticeable amounts of moisture from entering the building.
- Medium traffic areas, defined as roughly 400 people per hour, need between six and seven metres of matting.
- High traffic areas, which feature over 800 people per hour walking in and out of a building, may require up to ten metres of entrance matting to be completely safe.
In general, high traffic areas are larger retail buildings such as shopping centres or supermarkets, medium traffic areas are larger corporate headquarters or medium-sized shops, and low traffic areas include small offices and corner shops.
Why Do Corporate Entrance Mats Need To Be Longer Than Welcome Mats At Home?
A question that we are sometimes asked is why corporate mats need to be so much larger than a typical welcome mat found at home, which, whilst variable in size, are typically less than a metre long and barely half a metre wide.
The simple reason for this is that whilst people will consciously wipe their feet before entering someone’s home as a mark of respect, often spending quite a bit of time to avoid tracking dirt into the building, many people in retail and corporate settings are focused on reaching their destination instead.
Because there is no conscious action to wipe dirt off the soles, the entrance mat needs to be cleverly designed to wipe dirt away whilst they walk across it, which requires not only heavy-duty material but also more of it.