What to stock for a ten-robot cleaning fleet
The question we get from every facility manager running more than a couple of machines is the same: what should I actually keep in the cupboard? Here is the answer we give, and why.
Start by grading every part
Everything on a cleaning robot falls into one of three tiers, and the tier decides how you buy it.
- Consumables wear out on a schedule. You order them on a calendar, not on a fault. Brushes, squeegee rubbers, mop pads, filters.
- Wear parts fail from impact, cycling or age. You keep at least one per fleet and replace on inspection. Drive wheels, casters, bumper strips, tanks, batteries.
- Core components are expensive, serial-tracked and have a real lead time. You do not stock these deep — you agree a lead time, or you put them on consignment with a service partner who does hold them.
Most over-stocked cupboards we see are full of tier three, bought in a panic after one bad week, while tier one ran out.
A quarterly list for ten machines
| Item | Tier | Qty per quarter | Why this number |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main roller brush | Consumable | 10–14 | 300–500 h each; a machine on two shifts gets through more than one per quarter |
| Side brush pairs | Consumable | 12–16 | Wear faster than main brushes and cost a fraction |
| Squeegee rubber sets | Consumable | 12–20 | The single biggest driver of "it isn't drying the floor" |
| Filter pairs | Consumable | 10 | A clogged filter is how vacuum motors die |
| Mop pad sets | Consumable | 6–10 | Only for flat-mop machines |
| Tank strainer / float kits | Consumable | 4 | Cheap, and a stuck float looks like a major fault |
| Drive wheels | Wear | 4 | Roughly one machine's worth; covers the early failures |
| Casters | Wear | 8 | The most-ignored part on the machine |
| Charging contact sets | Wear | 4 | Intermittent charging reads as a battery fault and wastes a call-out |
| Battery pack | Wear | 1 | One spare lets you swap and diagnose instead of stopping |
| Vacuum motor | Core | 0 | Do not stock — agree a lead time instead |
| Main control board | Core | 0 | Serial-and-firmware matched; stocking the wrong revision is worse than none |
Two rules that save more money than the list
Replace consumables early, not on failure. A worn brush and a clogged filter both make the drive train and the vacuum motor work harder. The tier-one part you skipped is how the tier-three part dies. Changing a $70 filter on schedule is the cheapest insurance against a $900 motor.
Log what you replace. Six months of replacement dates per machine tells you which unit is running hardest, which floor finish is eating your consumables, and whether a machine is genuinely faulty or simply doing more work than the rest. We produce that log as part of a maintenance contract, but a shared spreadsheet gets you eighty percent of the value.
When consignment beats buying
If you run several sites, ask your service partner to hold the core components rather than buying them yourself. You get the lead-time protection without the capital sitting in a cupboard depreciating, and without the risk of stocking a revision that your fleet's firmware no longer matches. That is exactly the arrangement we offer manufacturers and multi-site operators in Vancouver.