Customer story – Qleeno

The Qleeno product is a unique cleaning machine that has a patented cleaning head. Qleeno are very low and therefore is reaches under standard furniture that has gap to the floor of only 20 cm! The machine is also able to be operated in all directions compared to regular machines that only can operate on a straight line. This together with low weight, easy transportation and superb cleaning result truly revolutionize the cleaning business.

The first Qleeno product on the market has power cords and to give even more customer value the company behind Qleeno wanted to have a battery version and contacted Alelion Batteries to see what was possible to achieve with new battery technology.

The first analysis gave the following wanted benefits and features:

Fast charging time to be able to have a 1:1 ratio between discharge and charging that would mean that the operator can uses the machine for a certain time and when the water needs to be changed anyway the batteries are changed and there is always a new fresh battery in the charger. This give a virtually “around the clock” operation!

Low weight is needed since the Qleeno is such an light design and this must be kept

Long cycle life is a strong demand since the machine is heavily used

Low cost is also important since the cleaning market is highly competitive

Environmental friendly batteries are extremely important for the SuperClean brand image and is an absolute must.

With these requirement a project feasibility study and a State Of Work was created. The first finding was that the chemistry Lithium Irion Phosphate had the best specifications and actually met all requirements on a high level. Still this technology is still fairly expensive and the cost turned out to be a problem for the total business case!

This gave that the batteries needed to be small since the cost is linear to the energy they can store. Small batteries comes from low power consumption so the project focused on reducing the power consumption by replacing motors and pumps and adding more advanced motor control. The assumption was to reduce the consumption by 30%. (it actually turned out to be more than 70% in the end)

To even more improve the business case we added more advanced battery control electronics to do cell balancing, optimization and protection that gave a longer cycle life.

The first sprint (one sprint is one month) was used to really optimize the placement of the batteries to give the best ergonomics and handling. Simple wooden mock ups was fabricated and tested. In total we tried at least 7 different designs before the decision was made. This was a time consuming task but well worth it in the end. In this phase we had professional users that gave valuable feedback.

The coming sprints were spent to develop and try out the motor control, battery dimensions, chargers and MMI strategy. At the end of the project production preparation came in and secured the production friendliness and quality assurance.

The product was officially launched at the 14:th of April 2009 and the Start Of Production mid 2009.

Now the product fulfills all stated requirements and enters the market as an even more powerful and unique achievement!

Learn more about Qleeno at this website: http://www.superclean.se/eng/default.asp

Qleeno Professional Battery Powered Cleaning Machine