General Cleaning Services

A surveyor cannot credit what he cannot see, and a welder cannot legally strike an arc over an oil film. Cleaning at a repair yard is not housekeeping - it is the access condition for nearly everything else in the docking specification, and general cleaning services are usually the first gang aboard for exactly that reason: the survey items, the steel work, and the coating scope all wait behind them.

Engine Room Cleaning: The Survey Enabler

The engine room arrives at a docking wearing its service history - oil mist condensed on deckheads, fuel weep under the floor plates, a bilge that has archived every minor leak since the last docking. Engine room cleaning strips that history in a fixed order: degreasing of machinery, bulkheads, and deckheads; floor plates lifted and the under-floor spaces and bilge wells cleaned to bare steel; save-alls and drip trays emptied and washed. The payoff is itemized elsewhere in the docking file - the surveyor sees actual plating instead of sludge lines, hot work permits stop dying at the atmosphere test, and the leak that has been hiding under old oil finally shows its source while there is still time in the dock to fix it.

The Rest of the Ship

Beyond the machinery spaces the cleaning scope follows the docking's other trades. Void spaces, cofferdams, and peaks are cleaned for inspection and coating; cargo areas are swept and washed to the standard the next trade demands; accommodation cleaning enters the specification after fires, floods, and exhaust incidents, or simply after a yard period whose grit gets everywhere. Two adjacent scopes carry their own regimes and their own gangs: cargo and fuel tank cleaning runs as the yard's dedicated tank cleaning service with its atmosphere and disposal logistics, and external hull preparation belongs to the blasting and washing trades rather than to the cleaning gang.

In Dock or in Service

The docking is not the only venue for this work, and price is not the only difference. Cleaning performed with the vessel trading - bilges, engine room sections, holds between cargoes - travels through tank cleaning and demucking services providers in ports and at anchorages, and a vessel that arrives at the yard already clean buys fewer dock days. The yard's own gangs earn the work that depends on the docking itself: spaces only safe to open in dock, cleaning sequenced tightly against surveys and steel, and the scale that a full docking specification dumps on one facility in one week.

Waste Is Half the Job

Every tonne of sludge and washwater the cleaning gang lifts must land somewhere legal, and the receipts matter as much as the cleanliness. Yard cleaning quotations should carry the disposal route inside them - who receives the oily water, the sludge, the garbage, and at what accounting - because the vessel's record books will reference those transfers long after the docking closes. The disposal side is its own facility capability, covered separately, and the practical rule is to buy cleaning and disposal as one accountable chain rather than two contractors pointing at each other.

Specifying Cleaning Without Surprises

• Scope by space, standard by purpose - each space listed with the standard the next trade needs: inspection-clean, hot-work-clean, or coating-clean, which are three different prices.
• Sequence agreed with the dock plan - cleaning gangs scheduled ahead of the surveys and steel they unlock, not in parallel with them.
• Disposal routes named - reception of what is removed included in the quotation with certificates promised.
• Safety regime stated - enclosed space entry procedures and atmosphere testing owned by the yard, documented per space.
• Photographic closure - before-and-after records per space, because clean is a claim and photographs are evidence.

Walk the vessel before the docking and write the cleaning specification from what is actually there. The yards below differ by dock type and size, wharf capacity, location, and verification - and a cleaning quotation that names spaces, standards, and disposal routes is the one written by people who have knelt under floor plates before.