The Complete Handbook of Brooms

Chapter 1: Understanding Brooms

A broom is a cleaning tool consisting of bristles bound to a handle. That functional definition is accurate but almost useless. What matters is understanding why brooms perform very differently from each other, and why the broom that works perfectly on a retail floor fails on a loading dock, or why switching from one bristle type to another can double or halve your cleaning time.

Before you can choose a broom or maintain one correctly, you need to understand the engineering underneath the simple appearance. The difference between an adequate broom and one that works poorly—or one that fails prematurely—comes down to decisions made during manufacture about bristle material, bristle stiffness, bristle density, handle length, handle weight, and how the bristles are bound to the handle. Each of these choices solves a problem. Each also creates a trade-off.

What a Broom Does

A broom works by friction and by impact. As you push or sweep a broom across a surface, the bristles bend and make contact with the floor or ground. Debris—dust, dirt, loose material, small pebbles—gets caught between the bristles and the surface, or becomes trapped within the bristle bundle itself, and moves along with the bristles toward the direction of the sweep. When you lift the broom or angle it to a dustpan, gravity and the bristles' natural stiffness cause the debris to fall away or to be released.

This sounds simple, but the specifics matter enormously. If the bristles are too soft, they