Cleaning floor grout can be a challenging task. The first thing to remember is that cement-based grout, like a concrete floor, may not be uniform. After grout has been thoroughly cleaned, there may still be some darker spots next to lighter areas due to factors of installation. This is not something that can be changed with different methods of cleaning. When there are soils that need to be removed from grout, first wet the floor with a degreasing or general purpose cleaning solution. Next, let the solution sit for several minutes, and scrub the floor with a brush that can reach down into the grout. Then pick up the solution with a wet vacuum or mop, apply rinse water and scrub, and then pick up the rinse water.

Buckeye offers effective degreasers and general purpose cleaners that can be used for this purpose including Buckeye Maurader^® and Eco^® Hydrogen Peroxide Cleaner E15. Both of these products contain hydrogen peroxide and have excellent detergency for wetting the surface and suspending soil. The hydrogen peroxide reacts with some soils to make them more soluble in water which can physically loosen soils. If your facility has grout that won’t come clean after using a good cleaning solution there may be a discolored coating covering it. You can remove it with a Buckeye floor stripper, and follow up with a Buckeye water-based cleaner to scrub the floor.

Another option you can try is to used an acid-based cleaner such as Buckeye Eco Acid Cleaner E16 and Buckeye Gel Scrub^™ Tub and Tile Cleaner. These products go after soils that are sensitive to acid chemistry and based on phosphoric acid. This allows them to attack the grout itself and loosen soils that can then be flushed loose from the floor. But do be careful to seal after the use of acid chemistry, since the use of acids is not meant to be a regular cleaning process. If you are unsure which solution is best use to clean your cement-based grout, try a small-scale test. This can reveal the winning solution without too much unnecessary work.

Have you ever been cleaning in a remote area, away from a filling station, and needed to change your mop bucket solution? Buckeye Eco^® Squeeze & Pour products are compact so you can carry them with you for dilutable cleaning on the go. Squeeze & Pour products are green, convenient, concentrated, and use proprietary technology.

Super concentrated Eco Squeeze & Pour products are formulated with proprietary technology for maximum efficiency and provide superior end-use cost. Many Eco Squeeze & Pour products are also Green Seal™ certified. Eco Glass Cleaner HD E12/S12, Eco Floor Cleaner E32/S32, Eco pH Neutral Cleaner E31/S31, and Eco Neutral Disinfectant E23/S23 are all products that you can use as Squeeze & Pour. These products and more are part of the Buckeye Eco Proportioning Program. The program has a simplistic approach to proportioning to help protect and preserve the environment, while helping you achieve the best overall value for each dollar spent.

You can check out the full benefits of the Eco Proportioning Program here.

Schools and universities can be a challenge to keep clean with the amount of high traffic every year. The Buckeye Honors Program is a complete online custodial training program for schools and universities. It presents the products, procedures, and training needed to meet your school or university’s highest standards.

The goal is to make cleaning and maintenance procedures easy and rewarding, while providing products that are safe for workers, students, and staff to be around. It is also important that the products are safe for the environment, but still produce excellent results. Quality products are key to having an efficient cleaning program at any school or university, but so is providing staff with the knowledge of how to use the products. The Honors Program website provides online training in routine cleaning, restroom, shower and locker room cleaning, carpet care, hard floor care, gym floor care, food service procedures, and product safety. The procedures are presented with easy to follow directions that are researched and proven to increase efficiency and make any clean goals maintainable.

The website features the complete program and materials that are available 24 hours a day for your convenience. You and your cleaning staff can login and view training videos broken into segments including routine cleaning, restroom, shower and locker room cleaning, carpet care, and more. There are also corresponding customizable PowerPoint presentations, training manuals, Safety Data Sheets (SDS), product literature, and wall charts. An additional benefit is that you and your staff can assess your Honors Program knowledge with tests that are available for each video segment.

The Honors Program website also makes cleaning simple with five basic steps for any area in your school or university including classrooms, hallways, lobby/entrances, cafeterias, gymnasiums and more. The five basic steps are high dust, spot clean, dust mop, empty trash, and damp mop. There are also surveys that are part of the program that allow supervisors to rate the cleanliness of a particular part of a facility. Whenever a school first implements the program they can use the surveys to rate the cleanliness and appearance of the entire facility. This can act as a baseline going forward with the program, and can be repeated after a few months of training. These results can show the staff were there has been improvement, and where certain areas are lacking. While using the survey the user can add comments, and take and attach pictures of the areas in question.

Whether your school has the largest campus in the area or the smallest, the Honors Program can be customized to your needs. Watch the video here to learn more.

 

Facilities often have trouble keeping textured floors clean. First, it’s important to know how floor types and floor finishes work together to provide clean and attractive floors. To start you need to ask yourself, why apply floor finish?

The answer is not simply to make floors shiny and pretty. Some facilities, such as hardware stores, may not care if the floor is pretty. The coating of a floor finish creates a protective layer on your floor, preventing heavy traffic patterns from wearing it down quickly. Floor finish also makes cleaning much easier. A smooth surface is easier to clean than a dull, coarse, or textured floor.

However, smooth and shiny floors are slippery when wet. That is why you will typically see textured flooring where water is present, such as the entrance to a public building. Have you ever ran into a building on a rainy day and slid as soon as you stepped inside on the shiny flooring? Unfortunately, slips and falls can happen, but there are ways to manage them. One option is to put walk-off mats in place, or use temporary walk-off mats when it is raining or snowing. Some stores even have 40-50 feet of walk-off matting before you step on regular flooring to prevent falls. Another way to help prevent slips and falls is to post wet floor signs. Either way, management must exercise proper care to provide a safe walking surface for the general public. If management doesn’t want to take chances on slips and falls, installing textured flooring can be a solution.

If you have textured flooring, fine bristle brushes on auto-scrubbers or swing machines can help get the dirt out of low spots. Another option is to use a pressure washer or orbital scrubbing machine. These machines clean not just the high spots, but can get into the low spots unlike spinning brushes, which move so fast they only clean from high spot to high spot and do not get down in between. A good floor finish to use on textured floors is Clarion® 25 Floor Finish because it doesn’t need burnishing. Applying a few coats will make the next deep clean easier to do and the coating underneath might act as a release agent if you use a strong, hot solution like Buckeye Blue® All-Purpose Cleaner. Buckeye’s full line of products can help clean smooth or textured flooring. You can be certain that all of Buckeye’s floor care products are compatible. With Buckeye’s Hard Floor Care Program, you can customize the most successful floor care program for your facility. Contact us today for more information.

The Eco^® Element proportioning system, part of the Buckeye Eco Proportioning Program, earned the Silver Award in the Design for Society category at the International Design Awards. There are many feature benefits that the design of Eco Element provides. You can choose between hidden and keyed integrated lock options and it is self-contained. There is no contact with concentrated product and no exposed tubing. The Eco Element also has translucent buckets, which allow for visual product inspection, ensuring product is always available. You can install the Eco Element in virtually any custodial closet and maximize storage space. And it provides safer proportioning without the concern for back-flow or siphoning.

The Eco Element can be used in remote, satellite, and focused locations. One of the best things about using the Eco Element is that it allows you to use up to three products. It can add quality and value to your overall cleaning program and can be used with the fully integrated Eco Proportioning Program.

The Eco Proportioning Program is designed and manufactured with proprietary technology with the end-user in mind. It is economically and ecologically friendly, while being effective and safer to use. Eco packaging is hermetically sealed to ensure no contamination and manufactured with 83% less plastic than rigid containers. There is a metering plug in every bag to ensure no tip clogging and highly accurate dilution. The Eco Proportioning Program has a simplistic approach to proportioning to help protect and preserve the environment, while helping you achieve the best overall value for each dollar spent. You can see check out the full benefits of the Eco Element and the Eco Proportioning Program here.

Carpeted flooring can be difficult to keep clean in any facility, especially in areas with high foot traffic. Buckeye Eco^® Carpet Spotter E51 and Eco Extraction Cleaner E52 can help, specifically, with carpeted floors. Both products can be used with the Buckeye Eco Proportioning Program and are Woolsafe^® approved.

Buckeye’s Eco Carpet Spotter E51 is a concentrated, full spectrum spotter that is effective on both oil and water-based stains. E51 uses an encapsulation technology to prevent re-soiling and is independently tested for the highest standards in performance and safety. It may be used on not only water-based stains, but oil stains too. Soil will become bonded to the chemistry for post spotting removal. There are many benefits to using E51 with your cleaning program. It can help any facility save on inventory and employee training dollars, all while being safer and effective to use.

Buckeye’s Eco Extraction Cleaner E52 is highly concentrated and designed to be used as a hot water carpet extraction cleaner at 1 oz. per gallon. The chemistry in E52 bonds with the oil, grease, dirt or other soil and removes it quickly with the aid of the hot water. E52 is effective on both oil and water-based soils, is low foaming, and leaves no residue to promote the re-soiling of carpet fibers. It can also help prevent the clogging of extraction jets, which saves time and money spent on costly machine maintenance. Be sure to check out Buckeye’s Eco Proportioning Program for a list of products that can be used together to provide your facility with the highest quality cleaning program.

For questions about this product or others, contact Buckeye International today.

A wood floor is one of the most expensive and prestigious floor types, and is an investment that should be protected. A wood floor maintained following the Buckeye Reflections Wood Floor Care Program will deliver years of beauty, performance, safety, and durability. It is also easy to follow and cost effective.

This program includes hands-on training at no cost to your facility and will extend the life of your wood floors. Buckeye Reflections products are stocked through Buckeye’s exclusive network of distributors. Reflections products do not have harsh odors, and many feature quick dry times.

Buckeye is committed to developing products that are safer for workers and the environment without sacrificing product performance. The Buckeye Reflections Wood Floor Care Program provides the most environmentally safe, VOC compliant Arena^® water-based wood floor coatings and high performance, VOC compliant Coliseum^® oil-based wood floor coatings on the market. You can clean, abrade and recoat your wood floors utilizing existing equipment in your facility.

Contact your local representative today to customize the Reflections program for your specific needs.

Green cleaning is less of a trend and is becoming the standard in many facilities. Everyday more facilities are wanting to switch to a green cleaning program, but hesitate because of the fear that it will be costly and hard to implement. A green program is one that uses cleaning methods and products with non-hazardous ingredients, and is designed to preserve environmental quality and human health. Not only do Buckeye products outperform other green products, they also outperform non-green, conventional chemistries.

The Eco program has a full line of products that are a better solution for any surface and clean effectively. Eco products are packaged in 1.25 L bags that are hermetically sealed to ensure no contamination, and manufactured with 83% less plastic than rigid containers. Several Eco products are NSF registered and Green Seal^™ certified, and all are effective, safer, and made with non-hazardous ingredients.

Following a Buckeye green cleaning program will improve environmental and human health, improve the cleanliness and appearance of your facility, and save you money. Make your facility more effective and efficient, and let green cleaning become your new standard. Contact us today for help.