Tips to get your industrial floor really clean - even if your facility gets really dirty - so you start each work day on a clean floor.
There’s nothing quite like the sense of pride you get from looking at your new facility.
The smell of fresh paint, the light shining on stainless steel, the immaculate floor.
Then you get to work.
Life happens. Oil drips. Ingredients spill. The floor becomes criss-crossed with tire tracks and shoe prints.
With a little routine care, though, your tile floor will clean up and keep its looks for a lifetime. The key is to clean consistently and not to cut corners.
Tailor Tips to Your Facility
The tips you’ll see below are general and apply to most facilities. But since no two facilities are exactly alike, you may need to tailor them a bit to fit your needs. The things most likely to vary from facility to facility are:
- How frequently you clean and
- The type of detergent you use.
Cleaning Frequency
How often you clean your floor obviously depends on what is happening on it. A room with heavy traffic will get dirtier faster than a room with light traffic. Light-colored tile will show dirty marks before dark colors.
Mike Hasuly, managing partner of Müller Industrial Services, recommends cleaning your floor at least once per day. A deeper wash should happen weekly or monthly, depending on your circumstances.
Daily Cleaning
- Sweep or vacuum to remove loose dirt and dust
- Wash the floor using a floor scrubber and a neutral cleanser - if your floor has oily spills make sure the cleanser includes a degreasing agent
- Rinse the floor thoroughly to remove any soap residue
Deep Cleaning
- Sweep or vacuum to remove loose dirt and dust
- Wash the floor with a heavy-duty detergent formulated for your needs
- Use a floor scrubber equipped with pads to scrub the floor clean
- Rinse the floor thoroughly with clean water and a squeegee to remove any soap residue
Choosing the Right Soap
On the Rhiel company blog, Jim Wade writes that businesses using the wrong chemicals, the wrong concentrations, or skipping the soap altogether won’t get the same results as those taking care to choose the right cleaner.
Choose a detergent that is formulated to break down the kind of mess on your floor. An auto shop, for example, needs a degreaser. An acidic detergent formulated to break down mineral scale won’t clean up an oil mark. Ask your Argelith account manager if you need advice choosing the right cleaner for your floor.
Spot Cleaning Tile Floors
Spills, especially oil-based spills, should be spot cleaned before using a floor scrubber. You can also use a mop and a bucket of clean, hot water to clean around the perimeter where your floor joins the wall, since many floor scrubbers will have a hard time reaching that area.
Auto detailers who use spray-on protectants should hose down bays in between each car to prevent those chemicals from building up on the floor.
The most common cause of hard-to-remove marks on a tile floor is too much soap in the cleaning machine. As the soap residue dries, it creates a place for dirt to stick. Once it is completely dry, the dirty marks are hard to get off.
Try soaking hard-to-remove marks in plain, clean, hot water to break the bond between the soap and the floor. Then scrub and rinse with more hot water. Prevent these marks in the first place by always diluting your cleanser according to the manufacturer’s instructions and rinsing the floor after using cleanser.
Floor Cleaning Dos and Don’ts
Do:
- Use a floor scrubber equipped with pads (not brushes)
- Clean with hot water - the hotter, the better
- Choose the right detergent for your circumstances - ask your account manager for recommendations
- Dilute detergent according to manufacturer directions
- If your floor is very dirty, apply hot, soapy water and let it stand for several minutes before scrubbing
Don't:
- Wash the floor using cold or dirty water
- Use a pressure washer to wash tile floors
- Clean too fast
- Use a dirty or defective floor scrubber. Perform a maintenance check on your scrubbing machine at least once a month.
