Do you have to strip or scrub your floors?

Floor maintenance requires extensive experience to be able to easily recognize what needs to be done and what doesn't. Floor stripping is the most expensive household cleaning task, so it's best to delve deeper into the subject. In this article, we'll look at how to effectively establish a floor maintenance program.

Building a soil maintenance program

First, you will need to consider several factors when developing your floor care program.

The floor covering: Vinyl tile, linoleum, ceramic, wood, rubber, concrete, terrazzo? Each floor covering has its own particularities and it is important to follow the recommendations of the covering manufacturer. Here are some examples of floor coverings below.

• Non-resilient floors which are hard floors such as: ceramic, concrete, marble, granite, terrazzo, slate, etc.
• Resilient floors: vinyl tile, linoleum, rubber, wood, cork, bamboo, etc.

The type of building:  Is it a daycare, a construction site, an office building, a school, a manufacturing plant, a corporate headquarters, a sports center? Each of these buildings has a completely different floor maintenance program!

The traffic: How many people visit your building? 5, 100, 1000, 7000?

What type of quality or result do you want? For some customers, the shine of the floors is not important at all.

The environment : What is the exterior environment, is the exterior of the building finished or still under construction?

Floor Care Program Tips

Depending on the answers you gave above, if you decide to implement a complete maintenance program for your floors, you will apply the following tips:

• THE polishing will be done very frequently to avoid damaging the floor's shine. This will be done using the high-speed polisher.
• THE scouring, consisting of removing one or two layers of finish and applying two clean, new ones, could be done one to three times a year
• THE stripping This will remove all layers of floor finish. If the previous steps are carried out at the correct frequency, stripping can be done every 3 to 5 years.
• The traffic in the building's rooms must also be taken into account. Some rooms will receive a lot of traffic and will need to be polished much more frequently, such as the entrance, hallways, dining room, etc. Other rooms, such as private offices, will receive less traffic. Therefore, it would be a waste of resources to apply the same program to all rooms.

Basic equipment

To have an effective floor care program, you will ideally need to have two types of polishers. There is the low and the high speede. The high-speed polisher will give you shine through polishing. The low-speed polisher, on the other hand, will be used for several tasks such as stripping, floor scrubbing, brushing hard surfaces, and even floor polishing. Polishers are generally equipment that can be easily transported from one building to another.

I also suggest you a wet-dry vacuum cleaner with floor scraperYou can use it to ensure that no dirt remains before cleaning and can easily pick up the floor finish that you remove.

A auto-scrubber is not mandatory, however, the auto-scrubber has the advantage of always cleaning more efficiently than with a single bucket-wringer. With 2 tanks, the auto-scrubber always cleans with clean water and another tank collects the dirty water, leaving the floor clean. You will also save a lot of time!

You will also need some specialized floor buffers also. The 3M company has developed a whole range of stamps. Here is the wall chart for the 3M stamp range.

3m Stamp Wall Chart PDF

Also, Diversey company has not only developed a complete range of housekeeping equipment, products, but also specialized floor buffers. Here is a article about choosing tampons.

We also did a special article on thelinoleum maintenanceIt is a little-known floor covering and Diversey has developed a range of specialist products for this type of flooring.

This article was intended to give you an overview of what your floor care program should contain.

• The assessment:  the types of floor covering, the type of building and its traffic, its environment as well as the quality expected by the customer.
• Establish the maintenance frequencies considering the types of premises
• And finally, knowing what should be part of your equipment and accessories.

There floor maintenance training could help you gain confidence and ensure you have the right working methods.