Hire & leasing
Fogger machine hire: the six questions we would ask if we were the customer
We lease foggers for a living, so we see the machines customers tried first. Usually it is a cheap garden sprayer bought online, run with a supermarket disinfectant, with nobody able to say what it actually killed. Here is the checklist we would work through if we were on the other side of the table.
In short
Before hiring any fogger machine, check six things: whether it fogs the whole room volume or only line-of-sight, which disinfectant it runs and what independent data backs it, the cycle and safe re-entry time, who trains your staff, what evidence you can put in a risk assessment, and the cost per treated room rather than the headline rate.
6 min read ·
1. Does it treat the whole room, or only what it is pointed at?
This is the single biggest difference in the category. A trigger sprayer or a directional mister treats line-of-sight surfaces. A proper fogger disperses a dry mist that moves with the air, reaching the tops of cabinets, the backs of equipment, curtain folds and the undersides of furniture.
If a supplier cannot describe how their machine achieves whole-volume distribution, you are buying a spray gun with a fan on it.
2. What chemistry is in the tank?
We run a hydrogen peroxide based disinfectant that breaks down to water and oxygen, leaves no residue and produces no waste stream. That is not a marketing preference — it is what lets you fog a canteen, a ward or a food line and hand it back quickly.
Ask for the safety data sheet and the efficacy testing. Ours supports up to 99.9999% (6-log) reduction of bacteria, viruses, fungi and spores, including sporicidal testing and laboratory work against Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
3. How long is the room out of use?
Cycle time and safe re-entry time are two different numbers and both matter to an operations manager. Cycles here are measured in minutes; the safe re-entry time is set per room volume at survey and written on the door sign the operator hangs.
That is what makes the routine workable: clean the room as normal, drop the machine in, hang the sign with the entry time, move to the next room. A few extra seconds per room for a hospital-grade decontamination.
4. Who trains the people using it?
Any supplier who will courier a fogger to an unnamed contact with no training is telling you what they think of your risk assessment. We train on site at the start of the lease, and only operators we have trained may train others.
Additional on-site training visits are available from £450 + VAT each, which most sites use when they take on new housekeeping or estates staff.
5. What evidence can you put in front of an auditor?
Environmental health, CQC, an insurer or a client audit will not accept 'we fog it'. They want the product, the dose, the contact time, the operator competence record and the schedule.
A leased machine from us comes with all of that as part of the package, because it is the paperwork our own network is built on.
6. What is the cost per treated room?
Compare like for like. Take the monthly lease from £450–£550 + VAT, divide by the rooms you will realistically treat — two a day is around 60 a month — and add the chemical used. Then compare that against an attended visit from £495–£1,095 + VAT.
The lease cost does not move whether you treat 20 rooms or 60, which is exactly why leased machines end up treating the offices, changing rooms and canteens nobody would have paid a call-out fee for.
Frequently asked
- What is the difference between a fogger and a mister?
- A mister wets surfaces it is aimed at. A disinfection fogger fills the room volume with a fine dry mist so every surface, including hidden ones, is treated in the same cycle.
- Can one machine cover a whole site?
- Often yes. At 8kg it is hand-carried between rooms and buildings, and one unit comfortably treats up to five rooms per hour depending on size. Larger estates usually take a second machine to run two teams in parallel.
- Is fogger machine hire available to individuals?
- No. We lease to registered organisations only — healthcare, food production, transport, education, care, housing, laboratories and similar sectors.
- How noisy is it?
- It runs for a few minutes in an empty, closed room, so noise rarely features. Operators set the cycle and leave, which is part of why it fits an existing cleaning round so easily.
Sources: material published by Sanondaf UK at sanondaf.co.uk (news, research and case studies) and the technical and commercial documentation held by the Shropshire & West Midlands office. Figures are indicative and confirmed at survey. Efficacy is stated as up to 99.9999% reduction.