- Wipe up spills the moment they happen
- Maintenance cleaning prevents harsh chemicals and harder work
Maintenance cleaning for tile floors is simple, but so many people ignore it. They wait until the floor is so dirty they can’t stand it any longer. The problem is that harsh chemicals are bad for almost every floor. You also have to work harder to get the floor clean. Maintenance cleaning will often save you serious hands-and-knees scrubbing (think “Mommy Dearest”)!
No matter what material makes up your tile flooring, maintenance cleaning is the same:
- Dust or Sweep Often
- Damp Mop Your Floors Weekly
comparable disposable cloth dusters are great inventions, but I don’t recommend them for most floors. The cloth pushes around the dirt, often grinding it across the floor, which causes scratches in the surface. These dusters also can’t get into the grout on ceramic tile floors. Invest your money instead in a dust mop, a rubber prong broom, or a vacuum attachment for bare floors. They are all simple to use. Your floor will look better and last longer.
Damp mopping is so simple and effective, yet so few people do it! Imagine not applying harsh chemicals to your floor, not having to breathe in fumes, but still getting your floors clean. Usually, a damp mop is all it takes. You might think that a damp mop won’t get your floor clean enough. Unless you are slopping raw chicken around on your floor or are growing bacteria in the corner as some sort of science project, it will usually get your floors clean – especially if you would otherwise put off cleaning them at all until they are “dirty enough.”
Reasons for cleaning floors
The principal reasons for floor cleaning are:- To prevent injuries due to tripping or slipping. Injuries due to slips and trips on level floors are a major cause of accidental injury or death. Bad practice in floor cleaning is itself a major cause of accidents.
- To beautify the floor.
- To remove strains, dirt, litter and obstructions.
- To remove grit and sand which scratch and wear down the surface.
- To remove allergens, in particular dust.
- To prevent wear to the surface e.g. by using a floor wax or protective sealant.
Methods of floor cleaning
The treatment needed for different types of floors is very different. For safety it is most important to ensure the floor is not left even slightly wet after cleaning or mopping up.Sawdust is used on some floors to absorb any liquids that fall rather than trying to prevent them being spilt. The sawdust is swept up and replaced each day. This was common in the past in pubs and is still used in some butchers and fishmongers.
It used to be common to use tea leaves to collect dirt from carpets and remove odours. Nowadays it is sill quite common to use diatomaceous earth, or in fact any cat litter type material, to remove infestations from floors.
There are also a wide variety of floor cleaning machines available today such as floor buffers,automatic floor scrubbers and sweepers, and carpet extractors that can deep clean almost any type of hard floor or carpeted flooring surface in much less time than it would take using a traditional cleaning method
Steps
- Clear the area. Remove whatever tables, chairs, throw rugs and other obstacles are on the floor.
- If you're cleaning any of those things, too, clean them first. That way, if any debris falls on the floor, it'll fall before you clean.
- If you'll be cleaning countries , tabletops, or other surfaces, clean those first.
- Send anyone likely to walk over the floor out of the area. That includes children, spouses, housemates, pets, and guests.
- Sweep the Floor or vacuum the floor first. It may seem redundant to clean something you're about to clean, but mops generally do a terrible job of picking up crumbs, dust, hair, and other solid debris. If you mop an unswept floor, you'll just end up pushing this stuff around. Moreover, dust and dirt can leave scratches on the floor if not removed first.
- Place the cleaner of your choice into the bucket and fill with enough warm water to cover the head of the mop completely. Leave enough of the bucket empty to allow yourself to add the mop and to keep the wringer up out of the water, if it is built into the bucket.
- Use the cleaner according to the instructions on the package or bottle. Usually, that means just enough to make it suds up a bit. Don't use more cleaner than you need. It will not add much benefit and it could leave a residue or damage the floor.
- It is possible to user ordinary dish-washing detergent. Just a squirt added to the water is adequate.
- Dip the mop in the cleaning solution and let it absorb the cleaner thoroughly. Sometimes a stiff, dried-out mop will need to soak for a little while to loosen up.
- Wring the excess solution out of the mop. You want it damp, not soggy.
- Start in one corner of the room. Move the mop around over the area you want cleaned. When you have covered a small area, or when the mop looks dirty, dip and wring the mop again and move on to the next area.
- For polyurethanes hardwood floors, run the mop with the grain of the wood.
- For textured floors, move the mop in small figure eight circles.
- For persistent dirt, you may want to visit an area twice. The first time, leave the mop a bit wetter than usual and use it to dampen the area thoroughly. Let that sit for a few moments while you dampen the next area. The extra time gives the cleaning solution time to dissolve the soil. Then, dip the mop again and wring it out more thoroughly. Go back over the area to pick up the water and loosen any especially stubborn dirt.
- Continue across the whole floor in this fashion.
- Work back towards a door and avoid stepping on the areas you have just cleaned. Any fine dust clinging to the bottoms of your shoes will stick to the floor and become mud. If you do step on an area that is wet, run the mop back over it to clean up these tracks.
- Let the mopped area dry thoroughly. Opening up doors or windows for circulation will speed the process. It's generally not necessary to dry a floor manually unless the surface shows streaks badly. Just let the air do the job.
- Replace any furnishings you removed from the area.
- Hang the mop up to dry out when you are finished. If you leave in the bucket, it will rot and start to smell bad. Hang it with the wet end down and hang it somewhere where a bit of water underneath won't hurt.
- Dispose of dirty mop water in a toilet. It's a better place to put something that might have solid sediments, and you won't have any dirty sinks.
- While not strictly necessary, it's a good idea to rinse your mop and wring it thoroughly once more before hanging it up, so that the residues of dirt and cleaners don't sit in the mop all the time.
Reducing the need for cleaning
Good well-maintained entrance matting can dramatically reduce the need for cleaning. For public and office buildings about 80 to 90% of the dirt is tracked in from outside. Installing a total of 15 feet of matting consisting of both indoor and outdoor sections will remove about 80% of this.Thus about two-thirds of the dirt can be removed at the entrance. BS 7953 'Entrance flooring systems. Selection, installation and maintenance' has standards relating to barrier matting.Helpful Links
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