I often see advice from various safety gurus about stair safety: Always use the handrail, never carry anything that requires two hands, keep your eyes open, and so on. The old sailors' adage, when up in the rigging working the sails, applies - one hand for the ship, one for yourself.
But I cannot recall anything on safely cleaning those stairs.
On carpeted stairs, vacuuming is straightforward: use a backpack vacuum, adjust the wand to a safe length, use the wand with one hand and keep the other on the rail. But many stairs are concrete or rubber - good traction, long wearing, but need an occasional scrub. Most floor scrubbers are 17" or 20", with a circular pad or brush - much too wide, and heavy. We have a 9" scrubber, light weight, designed for small areas or, one might suppose, stairs. But it has a standard three foot (or so) handle - inconvenient and a bit unbalancing, whether one is going up or down. And it takes two hands - none left for the handrail.
We clean a small college campus, with texture rubber stairs. Again, a good choice for the high traffic building, but not too easy to scrub.
So, although the 9" scrubber would likely have been faster, we used a small hand-held device, battery powered so there was no chord to trip over.
Nice results, and no-one injured.
