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