Clean Show Report (3)

It’s time for my annual Christmas/Santa Claus column and it coincides with the final phase of my Clean Show coverage. This is great!

I never got that mini-bike, Lionel train set, or the wristwatch packed in water when I was a kid.  I guess Santa had a better plan for me every one of those years.  It is a fact that never, in any of those years, did I go to bed angry that Christmas night, angry that I still didn’t have a slot-car set or whatever brought a twinkle to my eye that year.  Santa knew better.  Perhaps this is one of those years.

Christmas 2025 brings you a host of things that you never thought of, so you could dare not wish for them and it is those things that I will talk about this month.

A company called Presso is poised to turn this industry on its head with its AirTouch machine.  This is an incredible machine could soon replace the spotting board and the employee that we call the “spotter”. 

Picture this: There is a garment with a stain (just like what happens now), You use your experience to make an educated guess about the stain, such as whether it’s wine, coffee, or something else. (just like what happens now) You place the fabric on the board, (just like what happens now).  The similarities end here.  With AirTouch, you make a selection from the touch screen.  The software will ask you for your best guess about the stain.  It understands that you may not be certain, just like now.  When you start the cycle, the machine will add chemical.  You are allowed to scrub if you want to, but the demo that I watched did not require any scrubbing.   After chemical is applied, the AirTouch machine automatically adds steam, air, and vacuum.  With exactly zero employee input, the stain is completely gone, and the fabric is dry!  You must watch this demo.  Follow the QR code and navigate to the podcast that has the Presso AirTouch demo.  You can watch the unedited, untouched video.  Prepare to get your mind blown.

I’m sure that you won’t all be ditching your spotting boards tomorrow.   At least not yet…but. 

Forenta will thank you for that because they have just reinvented the humble spotting board.  It takes a special kind of ingenuity to look at something that appears to be perfectly fine and find something like ten things that need to be improved upon, but that is exactly what Forenta did.  Seriously, they deserve a heck of a lot of credit for that.  To name a few: They made the foot pedals far more ergonomic, the throttle valves for air and steam are now actually useful and functional, there is also a built-in vacuum. 

I now officially declare the end of central vacuum in drycleaning plants.  Not because of this spotting board, per se, but because Unipress has finally added built-in vacuum to their drycleaning presses.  Looking further underneath the hood of the new Forenta spotting board, you will find two must-have options.  An air regulator and the return of the long-lost stainless steel nose screen.  I feel certain that no one ever begged for a white Teflon version of this with 1/20^th as many holes in it, but it was rammed down our throats 30 years ago and I didn’t expect to see the screen again.  Thanks, Rusty. 

When you continually vacuum steam-water-chemicals from a garment, it goes somewhere, and we assume that it goes into the vacuum canister,  but it rarely gets that far.  It gets logjammed in the piping.  Forenta has added a vacuum-triggered check valve that drains itself.  Old-timers (like me) used to do this on (the now defunct) central vacuum tanks.  When the vacuum was turned on, the check valve would snap shut, but when you shut the vacuum motor off, the check valve would open and automatically drain the water that was collected from the presses that day.  You probably still have a central vacuum.  You should replace the drain valve with a check valve today.  You don’t want to buy another vacuum motor or tank because it is fast becoming a dinosaur.  It’s interesting that Forenta added this because usually the elbow that it is attached to (see the photo) is left to become clogged with gunk until the spotting board becomes junk.  Keeping this elbow clean as a whistle could keep that from ever happening.

But there are many other updates to familiar products.  SPOT has an entirely new interface.  Creative 360 does as well and PieceCounter has new reports and new, larger units.  You can see all of these things on my Podcast.  Scan the QR code with your phone and please be sure to subscribe.  I have two products podcasts which is quite a change from years past.  Following Clean Shows of years past, it has sometimes been difficult to come up with more than a couple of products that fit within the guidelines that I set for myself.  This year, there are plenty and they fill two full-length podcast.  One of them features my absolute favorite new products from Clean.  One comes from Railex.  Can you imagine a screw rail – many of us have one – that allows you to have garments moving at different speeds, and I mean drastically different speeds, along the same screw?  Railex does it and it is an engineering marvel.  You gotta see this.  The robotic spotting board makes the list, of course.  And Forenta came up with an inexpensive accessory that you just won’t believe that you have lived a day without.  It’s all on TALK Dryclean & Laundry USA.  See you next year.  Happy 2026!