How Often Should You Clean Hard-Surface Floors in Your Facility?
Hard-surface floors need more attention than you might think.
The first thing to understand about cleaning hard-surface floors is that there are many different ways to do it. The word “cleaning” encompasses multiple practices you can use to extend the life of your floor and keep it looking fresh.
Windsor’s PDIR system is a simple way to think of the different types of cleaning for your hard-surface floor.
4 Types of Hard-Surface Floor Cleaning
1. Preventative Cleaning.
The first thing you should focus on is Preventative cleaning. While this does include some light cleaning, more than anything, it refers to preventing soil from entering your facility.
How do you do that?
Matting.
Did you know that “80 percent of dirt is tracked in via the front door of a building”?
But you can capture up to 80 percent of soil with a 12 – 15-foot mat positioned by an entrance. What’s even more amazing is that, with walk-off mats of 39 feet, you can capture 98 percent of soil.
So, before you worry about specific cleaning products or techniques, make sure you have the right matting in place.
2. Daily Cleaning
Next, you’ll want to focus on daily cleaning. For many companies, this involves mopping. And this might surprise you, but we actually recommend against mopping. Here’s why — mopping doesn’t actually clean your floor. Every time you dip your mop back into a bucket of dirty water, you’re spreading dirt around instead of picking it all up.
What should you do instead?
Use a hard-surface vacuum to pick up dirt daily. And when you use a mop, make sure you use a steam or microfiber mop like we talk about in this post instead of a traditional mop.
Once you’ve got your mats in place and you’re performing daily cleaning, you should focus on Interim cleaning.
3. Interim Cleaning.
Interim cleaning can include buffing or burnishing your floor. If you’re unfamiliar with buffing, here’s what you should know.
There are 2 types of buffing: Spray buffing, which uses a liquid and a buffing machine that rotates up to 1000RPM, and Dry Buffing, which uses no liquid and a buffing machine that rotates over 1000RPM.
It’s generally recommended that dry buffing only be performed by floor cleaning professionals.
How often you buff your floors depends on multiple things, like:
- Amount of foot traffic
- Type of matting at entryways
- Amount of daily cleaning performed
You may only find it necessary to burnish your floors every few months. Target, on the other hand, burnishes their floors every night.
If you’re unsure where to start, talk to a hard-surface floor cleaning professional. They will be able to assess your needs, look at traffic patterns and make recommendations on how often it should be cleaned.
4. Deep Cleaning.
The final type of cleaning you want to focus on is deep cleaning or restorative cleaning. This type of hard-surface floor cleaning is used to get your floor back as close to its original state as possible.
Types of restorative or deep cleaning include:
- Top scrubbing and refinishing, which scrubs away the top layer of finish and adds a new layer of finish to protect from future damage. Top scrubbing and refinishing is performed when your top layer of finish is dirty. (This is less intensive than stripping and refinishing.)
- Stripping and refinishing, which strips the top layer of finish and adds a new layer of finish to protect from future damage. Stripping and refinishing is performed when your finish is damaged or worn down.
How often you conduct this type of cleaning will depend on the type of hard-surface flooring you have. For instance, restrooms should be deep cleaned at least once a year (if not more). On the other hand, concrete, LVT or VCT flooring should be deep cleaned quarterly and resealed at least once a year — especially if this kind of flooring is in common areas.
Restorative, deep cleaning is an intensive process and is ideally performed as infrequently as possible. But if you adopt the other preventative, daily, and interim cleaning processes, you can reduce the need for this type of cleaning.
Hard Surface Floor Cleaning Frequency
Ultimately, cleaning hard-surface floors comes down to performing the right type of cleaning at the right time. The best way to accomplish this is with a preventative maintenance plan, which we would love to help you develop.
All you have to do is click here to learn more about how we can help you keep your floors clean and get the most life out of them.