How to Keep Hard-Surface Flooring Looking Good Between Cleanings
Have you ever noticed when you walk into a Target store that the floors are always sparkling clean and shiny? Have you ever wondered why? The answer is that they burnish their floors every single night.
Although nightly floor polishing ensures your floors are sparkling clean every day, it’s not a practical approach for most businesses.
Hard-Surface Floor Maintenance Tips
If you don’t have Target’s floor cleaning budget, what can you do to keep your hard surface flooring, such as LVT or VCT, looking good between deep cleaning and burnishing?
Here are a few tips to help you maintain your hard-surface flooring:
1. Ditch the mop bucket.
When you think of hard-surface floor cleaning, a string mop and bucket of water may come to mind. However, this is not the best method for cleaning hard surface flooring and tile.
The problem is that this approach doesn’t really get the floor clean. Instead, you are spreading dirt around every time you dip the mop back into that dirty bucket of water. That’s why you so often see grimy tile and dirty grout in bathrooms.
If your janitorial team is still using mop buckets on your floors, it’s time to upgrade your mop cleaning system. Steam mops and microfiber mops are great alternatives that don’t leave dirty residue behind. Here are some options we recommend.
2. Clean and rinse at the same time.
Oftentimes, people think that more detergent or chemical is better when cleaning floors. However, the opposite is often true. If you use too much cleaning solution on your floors, it can leave a sticky residue behind on the flooring.
That’s why we recommend cleaning and rinsing your floors at the same time. It’s important to rinse flooring after you clean it to help break down the build-up of detergent on the floor.
Depending on your space, we recommend cleaning and rinsing your floor daily or weekly.
3. Keep dirt off floors.
As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The same is true of floor cleaning. The more you can keep dirt off of your hard-surface flooring, the better they will look in the long run.
Walk-off mats are one of the best ways to do this. Mats are not just valuable for carpeting; they can also help reduce dirt on hard surfaces as well.
Up to 80 percent of soil can be captured with a 12-15 foot mat positioned by an entrance. And you can capture up to 98 percent of soil with walk-off mats of 39 feet. Either way, having strategically placed walk-off mats will add years to the life of your flooring.
4. Use floor protection.
Furniture is one of the biggest causes of wear and tear on hard surface flooring. The regular movement of desk chairs on a daily basis can wreak havoc on your floors if you’re not careful.
Sure, a professional cleaner can buff or burnish out scuffs and scratches from your hard surface flooring, but using floor protection can help prevent unsightly marks and reduce the wear and tear on your floors. Depending on the type of chairs in your facility, we recommend using chair caster covers, clear sleeves, swivel protectors and sled base clips to prevent floor damage.
Here’s a look at the various types of floor protection we recommend to our clients.
A Little Hard Surface Floor Maintenance Goes a Long Way
Although nothing can beat the shine of regular floor burnishing, following these maintenance tips will help keep your hard surface flooring looking good. Not to mention, it will help you make the most of your flooring investment.