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.