me_irl

(oh dear this turned into an autism rant, I'm sorry:)

A dear friend of mine owned a regional child play-center (up until Covid) with a substantial ball pit that we would frequently drunkenly abuse help out with after hours, so I can weigh in on some of the technical aspects:

The cleanliness of ballpits is something of a stereotype brought about by a lot of things, mainly started by the McDonald's "playplace" trend in the US. It's not wrong to be skeptical of these, as many many smaller establishments really do not sanitize these enough, simply lacking the equipment to make that sort of thing feasible (at the height there was an entire industry of contractors specializing in cleaning them, so that fast food places didn't have to store the bulky machinery on site. This no longer exists.)

However at larger facilities with turnover and space enough to invest in the equipment (side note: said equipment wins my award for "most satisfying devices ever created"), sanitation of the balls (where the pee is stored) and removal of macroscopic detritus (generally trash and rarely diapers) can take as little as half an hour. The pits themselves are usually built with drains in the floor so even with balls in, simply scrubbing the walls with a pool scrubber and spraying down the walls with a decently pressured hose is going to get most of the particulate buildup dealt with (do NOT use a pressure washer, that was an experiment best described as "only funny because I wasn't the one doing it"). Full sanitation of the pit itself is usually done on the manufacturer's recommendation of a twice-weekly basis, and that's the real issue you see small operations skimping on that leads to buildups of things like Staph. The reason is that to fully sanitize the pit you've got to haul all the balls out of the pit to work, and most places just don't have the space to do that conveniently, so they uh... don't do it.

So the takeaway is: don't go into ballpits at a small facility ever, and at a big facility check to see if the rest of the place is generally clean first. Gum under the tables? Maybe don't. Otherwise you're probably just fine.

(The real disgusting things at places like this are the human-habitrails / child tubes. Those are almost impossible to sanitize by dint of adults not fitting comfortably, and can't be taken apart to make it easier. Seriously, stay OUT of those things.)