5 Tips for Looking after your Water Cooler

Water from Eden water coolers is tasty, safe and refreshing. However we want to ensure your cooler is working exactly as intended and keep you cooler in top shape, so take the advice of  Steven Riley, Cooler Expert for Eden Springs UK, to ensure the very small risk of water contamination remains small and unnecessary call-outs are avoided!

1. Are you plugged in?

It's a surprisingly regular occurance – a cleaner might take out the cooler power plug so they can plug in the vacuum cleaner and they forget to plug the cooler back in. A call to our water cooler customer service team follows explaining that the cooler isn't chilling the water, with a subsequent visit from a cooler expert, only to find out the cooler isn't plugged in! So if you haven't got cooled water, check one should be the power socket.

2. Watch for drip tray overflow

Often water cooler drip trays are left unemptied and overflowing, and this can lead to water spilling onto the floor. Often the first response to water on the floor is "The cooler is leaking" and an Eden Springs representative is called, and you go without chilled water unnecessarily. In order to maintain a clean and uncontaminated cooler we recommend regularly taking out the drip tray to empty and clean.

3. Store your water bottles in a suitable location

It's important to store your water cooler bottles in a suitable room or space; yes we'd all prefer the bottles to be near your cooler, but there are other equally important factors to consider. The bottles should ideally be stored in a cold and dark environment, and they should preferably be stored off the floor to avoid any potential contamination from the floor surface. There is always a small chance that any spills, debris or cleaning fluids used on the floor can get into the bottles over time. Also the water cooler bottles themselves are made of a type of plastic, and chemicals or even the colour and dye of the bottles can seep into the water if left in direct sunlight or alongside contaminating materials.

4. Don't refill water bottles

We generally wouldn't recommend refilling bottles etc from water coolers, especially if there isn't enough room for the bottle to sit well below the taps. This is because when refilling bottles people will often push the mouth of the bottle directly up against the water taps, and this is an opportunity for bacteria or viruses to transfer from the bottle to the cooler tap. If one person with a cold, say, did this in a busy office you can imagine how many people might catch this simply because they have refilled their bottle at the water cooler.

5. Clean inbetween sanitisation visits

To enjoy your water to the full contamination prevention is important. To achieve this we would recommend cleaning your water cooler intermittently and between our official sanitisation visits; it's obviously not a full strip-and-clean of the cooler, however any cleaning will significantly reduce the chance of cross-contamination of your water. To this end we can also supply you with special sanitisation kits, which contain a small hydrogen peroxide spray, wipes, and a brush for fine cleaning around taps. Simply spray the cleaning fluid, wipe off and allow to dry. After an Eden Springs sanitisation we also recommend changing the bottle on the cooler, as we don't know how long a bottle has been on the cooler and with a nice clean cooler and reservoir we don't want to reintroduce a potentially contaminated bottle.