Keeping Your Building’s Bathroom Floors Clean

When it comes to cleaning a facility’s floors, restrooms are too often not given the attention they need. While hard surface floors in areas like lobbies and hallways get meticulously cleaned and shined, bathrooms are mostly just swished with a string mop and a ton of chemical.

It’s a bad practice—and one that can negatively impact the overall health and perception of a building. More than most areas, people take notice of the cleanliness of bathrooms. In fact, they often judge the building as a whole by the appearance of the bathroom.

Even if you clean the sinks, replace the paper towels, and empty the garbage, a floor that looks dirty will make the restroom look dirty. A bathroom floor that’s not properly cleaned can also lead to the growth of odor-causing bacteria. And no one wants that.

Where Most Facilities Go Wrong Cleaning Bathroom Floors

From our experience deep cleaning floors in commercial buildings, we’ve found two main causes of poorly maintained restroom floors:

1. Using the Wrong Type of Mop

Many facilities have their bathrooms cleaned using an old-school string mop and a bucket of water with cleaner mixed in. Despite its common use, this is definitely not the best method for cleaning bathroom floors.

The main problem with using a traditional mop and bucket of water is that it doesn’t really get the floor clean. By dipping the mop in water (which gets dirty after the first dip), you are spreading the dirt around rather than removing it. Once it dries, you still have a dirty floor.

Also, when cleaning a bathroom floor with a traditional mop, an individual will leave too much water on the floor. This not only adds to the poor appearance of the floor when dried, it can help encourage bacteria growth.

2. Using Too Much Chemical

The thinking when cleaning a restroom is often the more chemical the better. After all, this is an icky area that really needs to be cleaned. But using too much cleaner actually ends up making the floor look (and feel) worse.

Anyone who’s ever experienced the soles of their shoes sticking to the restroom floor knows the feeling. Using too much chemical leaves a sticky residue on the floor that makes the floor unpleasant to walk on and gives the tile a foggy/filmy appearance.

If your shoes stick to the floor that means dirt will too—causing your floors to look dirtier quicker. Chemical residue left on the surface of bathroom floors can also lock odors in, enabling them to linger, and provide a place for biofilm to grow.

How to More Effectively Clean Your Facility’s Restroom Floors

If mopping and overuse of chemicals are the key problems buildings experience when cleaning bathroom floors, here are the solutions:

1. Choose a Better Mop

The absolute best method for keeping tile floor clean is a steam mop. This is true for a few reasons:

1. Steam mops use heat to kill bacteria and mold on floors
2. Steam mops don’t leave as much water behind so they dry quicker
3. Steam mops don’t require the use of chemicals, eliminating the residue problem

The downside with using a steam mop to clean your building’s bathrooms is that this approach is slow. Especially if you have multiple bathrooms to be cleaned multiple times each day, your crew may not have time to steam mop every bathroom.

If you choose to go this route, we recommend the VaporJet from Advanced Vapor or one of the commercial steam cleaners from Dupray. We routinely recommend these brands to our clients.

The next-best option is using a microfiber mop. While not quite as good as using a steam mop, microfiber flat-mop systems are a better option than traditional string mops. This is true for a few reasons:

1. You never have to rinse a microfiber mop in a dirty bucket
2. The split fibers of a microfiber mop more effectively pick up dirt rather than just pushing it around the floor
3. A microfiber mop won’t leave your bathroom floor soaked in water

We believe that CPI has the best microfiber mop system on the market and we regularly recommend their mops. You can find all of their microfiber products here. Microfiber Wholesale also offers a good microfiber mop system.

2. Be Precise with Chemicals

Use residue-free or low-residue cleaners on your building’s bathroom floors. And make sure you are using the right amount of chemical. If you are mixing your cleaner with water from concentrate, it’s important to be accurate with the dilution ratio. Remember, more chemical does not equal a cleaner floor.

3. Deep Clean Regularly

Effectively cleaning your bathroom floors on a regular basis will keep them looking better for longer. But you also want to give them more thorough, deep scrubbings with professional-grade equipment at regular intervals. Especially if you have tile floors with grout.

Since grout is porous, it absorbs bacteria and moisture—which can cause it to become discolored and create odor. Thoroughly scrubbing your tiles and cleaning grout lines will lead to cleaner, longer-lasting bathroom floors.

For many of our clients, we typically do deep tile cleanings twice a year. But if you are not cleaning your tile properly, or you already have floors damage or issues, it may be needed more often.

Give Your Building’s Bathroom Floors the Love They Need

While the business of restrooms may be unsightly, your bathroom floors shouldn’t be. By taking a more thoughtful and thorough approach to cleaning the floors in one of the most trafficked areas of your facility, you’ll see better results and provide your building’s occupants and visitors a better bathroom experience.

• Category: Blogs, Flooring Care