Floor finish - when to finish - when not to finish.

Most people look at a shiny floor and think that the shine is the reason we finish (wax) floors.

Not true. Finish is an outer layer - the "hard chocolate outer shell" (with apologies to M and M's) that protects the relatively soft under floor from abrasion / wear.

Thus we only actually need to finish floors that are either :

A) Soft - vinyl, wood, etc that are subject to being worn thru by constant foot traffic.

B) Porous - concrete that is subject to staining when spills penetrate thru the surface and discolor permanently. We sometimes seal (finish) grout lines on ceramic floors for the same reason.

While you don't normally notice wear even on unfinished floors, it does eventually show. The most common example in the commercial cleaning business is a plant manager or security guard's desk on a vinyl floor with no chair wheel protectors under the chair. Eventually the wheels will grind right thru the vinyl to the concrete sub floor below.

This would take many more years on a floor that wasn't constantly abraded by wheels, but high traffic situations would eventually start to wear thru. Think of how many shoes with sand and grit in the soles go thru a Target or Wal - Mart store in a year for instance. Each of those is a little piece of sandpaper grinding off a little of the floor - or a little of the finish, if the floor is protected.

For the ultimate example google "Bernoulli" - Bernoulli's principle was derived from observing wear patterns in (unfinished) stone stairways.

As an aside, I've been told - but haven't seen the data - that an unfinished floor is MORE slippery than a finished floor. This makes sense - if you were a finish manufacturer (Johnson's Wax is the biggest) you wouldn't want to be selling a product that increases the liability for slip and fall liability suits.

When should you not finish the floor ?

When it doesn't need it - ceramic floors, some sheet vinyls in low traffic situations that come with substantial factory finishes (medical exam rooms) and most types of stone floors (separate post)

In fact if you do atempt to finish most ceramic and stone floors you will usually be disappointed in the appearance - finishes in general do not adhere well to ceramic floors. They flake off - after a short period of time the floor looks like it has the aftermath of a bad sunburn - mottled with little white loose pieces of "skin" shedding.

Nobody ever gave me a straight answer on why this is - my two theories are that the ph of stone is a little different than the ph of vinyl so there is a chemical reaction that delaminates the finish and, alternatively, that the finishes are resilient (like vinyl) unlike ceramic - so that foot traffic compresses and decompresses the finish on top - but not the underlying ceramic, so they separate. Doesn't really matter why tho - finish will separate from a ceramic floor, and you won't get the appearance you would like.

Bob

Floor finish - it's plastic, not "wax"

This really isn't all that important - commercial cleaners never use wax anymore - but purists will correct you from time to time.

Wax is used exclusively on wood - and even a lot of wood floors (gym's, laminates, etc) have plastic based finish rather than a true wax.

If you've ever tried to maintain a shine on a high wear surface (floor or table) you'd understand why - it is a massively labor intensive and frustrating process - the first foot to walk over the surface can blemish days of buffing.

I'm not a chemist - but the most common description of finish I hear is "metal interlock plastic finish".

That it's plastic does have some different maintenance problems (covered elsewhere) - but they are trivial compared to trying to maintain a wax surface.

Bob

Floor finish - when to strip and rebuild

Ideally you should never have to strip and completely rebuild a floor's finish - IF you do complete interim maintenance - including rebuilding the finish frequently with additional coats to replace the finish walked off.

And don't spill anything that can penetrate the finish and discolor parts of it.

And don't turn on the lights - UV light turns finish brown - eventually.

Since this never happens in real life commercial cleaners eventually have to strip all the old finish off - just like you would with paint or an old finish on a piece of furniture or molding in your house - and rebuild the finish.

The process is similar - the chemicals are different.

A lot of different things will strip the old finish off - alcohol (any organic solvent), high alkaline degreasers and "strippers" (the traditional option), very hot water (which is why janitors do their daily mop and autoscrub with room temperature water, not hot water) - but the best option is a "stripper" formulated by the same manufacturer as the finish, specially formulated to react with and break down the finish.

Did I already say I'm not a chemist? - I can't give you a whole lot about the chemistry involved - but I can tell you that spending a little more on finding a stripper especially formulated for the brand of finish you are trying to remove is going to save you so much labor that a little research in finding the right product is time well spent.

The process, once you pick the product is to thuroughly clean the floor.

Mop the stripper on.

Let it work for 5 minutes or so - to start dissolving the finish.

Agitate with a low speed floor machine.

Vacuum up the finish and stripper with a wet vac.

Rinse / vacuum up rinse water.

Apply new finish.

The process to rebuild the finish before it needs to be stripped is similar - scrub the floor clean - but skip the the stripper / agitation piece and go right to applying new finish.

Bob

Marble, Granite, et al - how to maintain and clean.

Marble and granite are both harder versions of limestone.

Granite is the adult stage - marble is the pupae - and limestone is the larval stage - if you want to think of it that way.

Granite is much older, much denser and thus much more resistant to foot traffic - thus it does not need finish and won't stain. Makes a great floor - expensive tho.

Marble is hard - but will eventually wear down - and certain types of soil will penetrate and stain it.

Limestone is much softer - don't see much of it in floors - mostly in walls.

Sand (silica and quartz), oddly enough, is much harder than both - hence the wear. There is something called the Moh's scale (named after a German Geologist) rating the relative hardness of these surfaces. Silica and quartz are a 7 - marble and granite are 3.5 to 5. Hence the harder sands abrade / wear down the softer marble and granite..

Marble can be restored by grinding with a diamond grit polishing pad (diamonds are a 10 on the Moh's scale) under high pressure when it does wear down - but it's an expensive process.

Ideally you'd like to have the stone visible on the borders or lower traffic areas and the granite and marble covered with mats or area rugs in the high wear areas to reduce wear and reduce the need for expensive restoration processes.

Bob

Carpet Dyeing - it actually does work.

OOOPS !!

Posted my (brief) remarks in the comments section below - not here.

Early post.

Disinfecting, etc.

All commercial cleaners "use disinfectants."

Almost no janitor truly "disinfects" tho.

Disinfecting requires wet dwell time - usually in excess of 10 minutes. If you see a janitor wiping a surface with a disinfectant soaked cleaning towel or spraying a disinfectant on and immediately wiping it off, it is unlikely that the surface was actually disinfected.

Because the disinfectant didn't ( and must) remain wet on the surface for 10 minutes - required to actually kill all the pathogens.

Disinfecting also requires use of multiple disinfecting agents - how many time's have you seen someone wipe a surface (even assuming they left it wet for the 10 minute dwell time) with one sort of disinfecting agent (say a quaternary ) and then followed immediately with a second disinfecting agent (say a phenolic) also allowing it to dwell wet for 10 minutes or so ?

Try never.

It's no problem to do this - that's NOT why it isn't happening, by the way.

It is a problem to get commercial cleaning customers to pay for it - you'd double or triple your cleaning budget - and the only places willing to pay for the required janitorial labor are surgeries where they actually cut into the body and very dirty procedure rooms like say procto rooms.

"oh my goodness - we're not perfectly disinfecting everything every day - then why aren't more people dying?? "

A couple of reasons.

1) Disinfecting means killing down to a very low level (near 0% ) of residual pathogens. Getting to 1% is not technically disinfecting, but it is 99% better then doing nothing. It's not, however, good enough with immune compromised patients such as cancer chemotherapy folks.

2) Most pathogens need food. We do almost as much to reduce infection with non disinfecting cleaners that are highly effective at removing the organic soils that pathogens live on (and the pathogens at the same time). Again - not necessarily good enough for the

immune compromised tho.

In fact, if you are not going to allow the necessary dwell time there is at least an argument that you are better off using a highly effective non-disinfecting cleaner than improperly using a true disinfectant that leaves more soil.

3) We are dying from this. After tobacco and obesity, hospital acquired infections are supposedly now the third leading cause of death in the US. Not as many varieties or as much severity of pathogens in the average office - remember who's using hospitals - so not as big a problem in most situations we see in our customers.

4) On a personal note - never be the last patient of the day in an out patient surgery. My old man went partially blind from an infection he picked up as the 8 th cataract surgery of the day - I'm pretty sure the other 7 didn't - and while we'll never know for sure that he wouldn't have been infected if he'd gone in at 8 AM, how would you bet it ?? Pretty profitable day for the surgeon tho ??

More to the point what time of day are you going to schedule your next procedure ?

I'll expand this to cover terms like "sanitizing" that are equally misused at a later date.

Bob

Why do Target Stores have pretty floors ?

Short answer = burnishing

Long answer = big budgets for shiny floors.

I don't know what the cleaning budget for a Target store is these days - but it used to be 200 or so janitorial hours per week. About double what a second class appearance like a Wal - Mart used to do - tho Wal - Mart's are looking a lot nicer these days, so I suspect their budgets are closer to Target's now.

Target stores will:

-Completely sweep and scrub all floors every nite with a machine called an "autoscrubber" - a kind of mini Zamboni that scrubs and vacuums up the mop water at the same time.

- Hi speed burnish (polish, buff - similar to a monster version of the rotary buffer you use on your car) every night.

- Replenish the finish worn off with daily traffic :

-Daily with a product called a "restorer" applied by the autoscrubber
-Weekly, monthly, as needed with mopped on finish in higher concentration.

We do some variant of all these on any hard surface floor - but Target is kind of the "frictionless example" in that they have a high need for this sort of effort because of the high traffic counts wearing off their finish every nite, and a willingness to spend money on janitorial labor to look "brand new" every day.

The more traffic, the more expense to achieve any level of appearance, including the high level of a Target store.

Cusomers with less need for "new look" floors and less foot traffic do exactly the same operations - just less often.

Bob

Carpet Cleaning - Dry Methods

Basically everything I say about bonnet cleaning applies to dry methods. Some of them are higher productivity than bonneting tho.

You will hear brand names like Host, Chem Dry, Whittaker and a bunch of others instead of "dry" tho - so when you hear a brand name it probably really means some form of dry carpet cleaning.

Extraction - either self contained or via a truck mounted rig will usually be referred to as extraction, or, improperly as shampooing.

The one difference is that while bonneting, properly done, uses almost no water and leaves the carpet dry in a couple of hours, dry products use no water at all and the carpet is dry immediately.

You first vacuum the carpet to pull as much dirt as possible out (also true with bonneting) spread a powder that "encapsulates" dirt - similar chemistry to the emulsification of a solvent or detergent carpet cleaner - and then agitate it with a brush system to get the soil to adhere to the "capsule".

You then vacuum up the chemical - dirt attached.

My bias is that this has a higher probability of leaving more chemical in the carpet, thus having a higher probability of resoiling than bonneting - but properly done with no overuse of chemical both should give about the same result.

Bob

Carpet Cleaning - Bonnet Cleaning

I happen to like bonnet cleaning.

I especially like it as an additional procedure to a normal extraction.

Bonnet cleaning involves putting a cotton pad on a low speed rotating floor machine and buffing the carpet just like you would burnish (see other post) a tile floor.

You prep the carpet by putting a traffic lane spotter on the soiled areas of the carpet and keep the pad wet so the friction of pad on carpet doesn't bring the process to a dead stop.

The knock on bonnet cleaning is that it's an interim process - it makes the top of the carpet fibers clean, but doesn't do anything for the soil trapped in the lower layers and pad (if any).

True.

So what ?

The procedure can be done very quickly with equipment that is available in most buildings and leaves the carpet dry so it can be walked on the next day.

It's also a good way to immediately remove spots.

The only real negative is that if you use to much chemical you will make the restorative procedure (extraction) a little more time consuming, and can lead to the same "browning" you get if you use too much chemical in an extraction.

Too much detergent will also lead to "resoiling" - since the detergent attracts soil to itself as a necessary part of the cleaning process, it will also continue to attract soil when left in the carpet.

As an additional procedure in an extraction, it's an excellent way to get "agitation" - one of the four variables in successful carpet cleaning without having to use a more abrasive carpet brush. A good bonneting will thoroughly mix the emulsifying detergent or solvent with the soil we are trying to remove - improving the outcome of the extraction without having to either oversoak the carpet or do repeated passes with the extractor to attain the same degree of emulsification.

Bob

Carpet Cleaning - Extraction

This is the restorative method of cleaning or "deep cleaning" of carpet and what most people think of when they think of carpet cleaning.

Basically you completely saturate the carpet and pad with water (and usually detergent or solvent carpet cleaning chemicals) to get chemical in contact with ALL soil anywhere in the carpet, emulsify it and vacuum or "extract" it.

Dry methods generally only get surface and near surface soil - not the stuff deep down in the backing and pad.

It is critical that the extractor be properly maintained and / or multiple extractions be done to make sure you get (almost) all the water out of the carpet. Leaving too much water in the carpet will rot it, delaminate it from it's backing, loosen the glue that holds it to the floor, stretch it , lead to mold, and all sorts of other bad things.

Do not leave the job until the carpet is dry enough to finish drying completely in a couple more hours.

If you have used a "Green Machine" from late nite infomercials you have used carpet cleaning equipment similar to most self contained extractors. They also put water and detergent down with a spray nozzle, agitate with a brush and vacuum up with a vacuum attached to the other end of the machine.

Commercial machines go from sizes similar to a "Green Machine" all the way up to self propelled units about the size of a small asian automobile - machines that can clean 15,000 feet per hour versus a few hundred for the "Green Machine" and a thousand or so per hour for a small commercial unit.

There are also options to do all three operations separately with heavier duty single purpose equipment - a good choice for extremely heavily soiled areas - similar to my reference to using a bonnet cleaning in addition to normal extraction.

Finally the alpha equipment is called a truck mount unit. Usually instead of chemical these use heat and are sometimes called "steam cleaning". Same result - heat is as effective, properly used as chemical at loosening and removing soil adhering to carpet fibers.

(It's not steam however - even when it leaves the heater it isn't steam, and when it gets to the end of the hose it's a long ways below F212/C100 - but it's still plenty hot enough to do the job, and to burn you - be careful. The suction hose used to extract water thru 300 feet of hose has one heck of a lot of suction too - you do not want to get your shirt, hand, etc anywhere near the intake - if you don't want to lose your shirt, hand, etc)

Bob

Carpets - Browning

Browning happens when you over clean a carpet and change it's chemical composition.

Detergent based carpet cleaning chemicals are alkaline - some heavily alkaline. Carpets are a little on the acid side of neutral. And, carpet dyes are a little on the acid side of neutral - otherwise they wouldn't work with the carpet fibers. If you leave the alkaline carpet cleaner in the carpet ( i.e. you don't rinse enough ) the dyes become inactive and what's left is usually something between a beige and a coffee colored carpet.

Best (worst case) example I ever saw was a large manufacturing company in the western suburbs that prided itself on it's ( large and expensive) in house cleaning crew. Every foot of carpeted corridor in the place had 6 inches or so of original color (some version of blue I think) along the walls and a uniform brown thru the middle of the aisle.

A soil pattern, by the way, will NOT be uniform - it will be darkest in the middle and progressively cleaner as you progress out to the edges (thank you professor Bernoulli ? ).

Told the facilities guy the answer -

1) Neutralize the carpet with a mild acid product. You can buy such "neutralizers" at your janitorial supplies distributor to run thru your carpet cleaning equipment. The old fashioned option would be to mist it with a mild vinegar solution. This should immediately acidify the dyes and fibers and restore the original carpet color.

2) Henceforth clean with just water - no chemicals - a few times. There was enough soap residue in that carpet to stop buying chemical for years.

He did. It worked. He got rid of the in - house crew and hired a cleaning contractor - not me unfortunately. C'est le guerre ?

Bob

Citrus cleaners

Citrus cleaners are one of the few "magic" things in our industry.

When you see the "Orange glo" infommercials on television, there is more than a grain of truth to their claims for efficacy on multiple surfaces and multiple soil types. There are also plenty of more concentrated versions and more targeted versions at your local janitorial supply distributor, Graininger, etc.

It's also about the only thing that will dissolve and remove adhesives - handy thing to know if you ever strip up tile or glued down carpet.

They also have the advantage of being pretty innocuous - I wouldn't drink them, nor would I recommend it, but they are one of the least toxic cleaning agents available. More importantly they are less likely to damage carpets or other surfaces than alcohol or detergent based cleaners.

Also recommended for any type of oil and grease stain in carpets -

Bob

Plant Cleaning - the "Billy Goat"

I ran into these when I was cleaning Federal Express' facilities years ago. It's a vacuum cleaner of sorts - looks kind of like an old Royal vacuum - after it's been on steroids and in the weight room for about 10 years. One brand is made by the "Billy Goat" company, but I think it's called a "billy goat" because it's big enough to gobble up tin cans. (Aside -- goats don't really eat cans - they eat the labels off the cans because they like the taste of the adhesive) Also used for small parking lot sweeping jobs, it's about a 24 to 36 inch wide vacuum with a mouth big enough to take in large debris, and a huge bag to hold the debris. Most of the ones I've seen were gas powered, so you can only use them in well ventilated areas. Although I think I've seen a smaller cheapie version at Home Depot recently that was cord electric - not sure exactly what you would use the little one for - maybe your garage at home?

Most of the battery sweepers we use really aren't designed for big heavy debris - or for irregular surfaces. They work best on sand, dust, road salt etc on a smooth concrete surface. But every once in a while you get a really nasty sweeping job and you need a "billy goat".

Bob

www.billygoat.com is one site

(for some reason my Mac doesn't want to paste it in as a live link - looks like you'll have to google it)

Entrance Mats - how to evaluate ....

3m can say it much better than I can - and have been for the 20 plus years I've been in this business.

That said, I've cleaned hundreds of buildings - by proxy anyway - and toured thousands in my job as sales manager. I've seen negligent, good and great approaches to matting entry ways.

The best investment you can make in the appearance of your building is a first class and sufficient floor matting system. For a few hundred dollars per entry you can potentially save yourself thousands of dollars of janitorial expense and flooring wear, tear and replacement.

And don't forget that a warehouse or plant entry, incompletely matted, can be more detrimental to the cleanliness of the building than an external entry.

US 3M Commercial Care: Entrance Matting

Bob

Odor control - Ozone Generators

These require a little more thought than most odor remediations - and a little more investment - ours are about $800 a copy.

They work great tho - you just have to understand the process.

Ozone is that fresh clean smell you get after a lightning strike in a thunderstorm. O3 to the chemists, it is three oxygen ions vs the 2 in O2 - the normal form of oxygen.

It is highly unstable in O3 form - it very quickly "bumps into" another O3 ion and makes 3 oxygen O2 molecules out of the 2 O3 ozone molecules.

Hence it is a potent "free radical" as they say in the health food stores, a likely carcinogen in O3 form.

This is good and bad.

It is bad if you are in the room when the machine is running - the O3 will also interact with the molecules in your body to form O2 and some mutant bad thing - at a minimum it will make you and your pets nauseous - which creates odors rather than fixes them.

However.......

If you are not in the room - it is good - it will interact with the odor causing organic substance and immobilize, for want of a better word and eliminate the odor.

This is why ozone generators have timers - you set the timer for a half hour or so (ours are rated for a 1500 square foot area in about 60 minutes). You stay away for an hour or so after the timer expires. After immobilizing all the odor, the remaining ozone will go thru the first process I mentioned - reacting with other ozone ions to form pure oxygen and "problem solved".

The machine itself is just two electrical plates a few millimeters apart that form little tiny lightning bolts in between when the current is on. Low tech - but real effective.

We've used these in all kinds of places -

- antique bathrooms where we couldn't trace the odor -the ozone will penetrate cracks in walls and grout and get at odor sources you can't reach with a disinfectant.

- carpets - same thing - leave it on long enough and it will penetrate deeply to immobilize / kill organics like mold and mildew.

- pet stains in wallboard - it won't cure the problem - but it will go far enough into the gypsum to buy you a couple of days peace for your pet allergic friends to attend your New Years Eve party. This is not an hypothetical - I've done this.

- new carpet odor - the odor is VOC's (you're solvent sniffing when you move into new plastic carpeted environs) and that is the "classic" organic chemical as your chemist friends will tell you. Ozone bonds with the VOC and basically makes it inert so it can't hurt you or annoy you any more.

I actually had an employee use it to "save" one of his adult children's houses. They had spent years and a ton of money remodeling an old house - and were all starting to suffer from allergies - sick building syndrome. They vacated the house for a couple of mornings one weekend - ran our generator on full tilt for a couple of hours upstairs, then down. Still in the house 5 years later - no allergic reactions.

There are also low power generators for continuous use in smaller rooms where people don't spend all day inhaling the ozone - like plant or retail bathrooms. They are made by a company called "The Ozone Specialists" under the brand "Newaire". I haven't used these, but they look similar to the ones that the Sharper Image used to sell in huge quantities, and people swore by them. I just wouldn't put one in a bedroom or an office where you sit and inhale it all day. I don't think they ever proved a link between cancer and ozone - and low exposure probably isn't much of a risk - - but I wouldn't recommend 40 hours or more a week exposure to any oxidants. They also make something similar to the old Sharper Image car deodorizer for people who smoke in their car.

www.ozoneexperts.com.

Pretty cool - huh ?

Bob

Odor Control - Mildew - Liquid Enzymes

One of the few occasions when my wife actually admitted I knew something about commercial cleaning was the summer the elementary school she volunteers at got water damage. They were remodeling and an unforeseen thunderstorm hit when the building wasn't properly covered by tarps. No serious damage - but when the teachers came in Monday for the final prep days for the upcoming start of classes the mildew smell was pronounced. The district employees extracted the water - but didn't really know what to do about the smell. I gave her 2 quarts of "liquid enzyme" and instructions to give them to the two teachers she was closest to. Simple process - you mix it by label instructions - usually about 4 to 1 with tap water in a spray bottle and wet down the carpet throughly with the mixture.

The enzymes are a semi - living entity that reproduce in the presence of a food source and moisture, and mildew fungi in carpet are one of their absolute favorite foods. Once they "eat" all the mildew, they die and basically turn into a very fine dust that can be vacuumed up.

The next day the two teachers using the enzyme had no mildew smell - the classrooms next door - not so lucky. Side by side testing anyone ?

Enzymes also like to "eat" residual tobacco odor, pet urine (ok - it was the second time she believed I knew wherof I speak - the first was a cat urine problem in the basement) and pretty much any organically derived odor cause.

I've also used it in conjunction with ozone generators in more serious and pervasive odor situations.

Non -toxic, environmentally ideal, a perfect solution in many odor situations.

Liquid enzyme is also the active ingredient or one of the active ingredients in some ceiling cleaning formulations, some over the counter cleaning products, certain carpet cleaning formulations, septic tank restoratives, and drain deodorizers.

As always - read label instructions - it's almost impossible to use this in a dangerous way - but if you don't get the dilution right it will be ineffective.

Bob

An Overview

While I'll opine from time to time, primarily this is thumbnail expanations of commonly occurring commercial cleaning techniques and issues for our janitorial franchisees, employees, and customers.

I also want to use this as a library of links to well written technical articles. Coverall North America's technical people are among the most prolific contributors to our several trade journals - and pulling as much of that wisdom together as possible in one spot should help all of us with our day to day operations.

Bob