Floor Cleaning And Floor Care

“First Impressions Count” You must have heard that term before and and that applies equally to your office or other workplace as well, doesn’t it?

No matter whether you have a block of offices, a retail store or a busy pub/night club your premises floor is something that everyone sees and helps formulate their impression of your business. Would you do business with a person who obviously does not take care of their premises?

Lets face it if they don’t look after their own business how can they look after yours?

Whether your floor is a solid hardwood polished floor (or even a veneered wood surface), carpeted floor, waxed vinyl or a stone floor such as marble or slate. Every type of floor surface has its own advantages and disadvantages to you but they also present us with different issues when drawing up a professional floor cleaning program that cleans your floor and provides long term protection of your expensive floor covering.

Floors or floor coverings of all types are always expensive to replace. That’s why we at Clean Care Scotland are so interested in not just cleaning your floor but ensuring it maintains a high quality appearance.

For example, many of our floor cleaning company competitors will tell you they will vacuum the carpet on a daily basis. What they don’t tell you is that the type of vacuum cleaner they will be using will make little difference to the amount of deep down levels of dirt and grime removed.

Some vacuum cleaners will visually do a great job of removing the top dirt but the sand and small grit left behind continues damaging your carpet every time someone walks over it.

For more information on carpet cleaning go to our carpet care pages.

We recommend a two pronged approach to virtually every floor cleaning job.

We want to provide you with a quality clean on a day to day appearance level but in the longer term we will work to save you money in the longer run by protecting your floors.

Floor Cleaning | Wooden Floors

With good quality wooden floors too much cleaning using a mop and bucket of water can lead to internal wood damage and creating the need for early replacement. If the top surface is okay (meaning it is still well sealed and properly protected) this will not be a major problem for you.

However if your cleaning company is using a floor cleaning chemical not designed to be “ph neutral” then the protection originally applied will get worn away faster and the water being used will start to damage the floor.

I recently walked into a potential cleaning project where the cleaners were using a floor cleaning product clearly marked as suitable for pine floors. They were mopping it on in a fairly strong solution and using lots of cleaning liquid on the floor. This made sense to the customer until I pointed out that the floor surface they were cleaning was not pine wood but a polished surface laid over  a sealed wooden pine floor.

I then looked more carefully at the product label and saw it was a fairly acid PH which would be dissolving the floor polish that was being applied each week. The customer was paying his staff to apply a floor polish every week and then using a floor cleaning product on a daily basis which would be dissolving the polish and removing it.

It may look okay at first glance but we will always test the floor in both high traffic regions and low wear areas before we can safely recommend a suitable floor cleaning programme for you. See our section on maintaining and cleaning wooden floors.

Floor Cleaning | Stone Floors

Stone Floors are usually very hard wearing but when they are damaged it will be normally be difficult and very expensive to replace. Recently following a major refurbishment of a pub I saw a stone floor where the building contractors had done an “acid wash” to clean it.

That stone floor was permanently damaged unless they were willing to spend a lot of money and time grinding the top layer off and putting a new seal on to protect it again in the long term.

We have written a separate section on maintaining and cleaning stone floors.

Floor Cleaning | Vinyl Floors

Vinyl (or more accurately polyvinyl chloride PVC) can be laid in sheets or tiles.   When these first came out asbestos was being used as the backing layer however with the knowledge we now have about danger of asbestos this has been substituted by inorganic clay.  Obviously if you still have the older version of PVC floors special care needs to be taken and we would recommend you allow us to carry out a simple test if you are unsure of the age of your PVC floor.

Most floor cleaning companies will neglect to check this and can lead to your staff being exposed to dangerous asbestos dust in the workplace.

Again we will often suggest that a specialist strip and seal be carried out to protect the top layer of the floor especially if you are dealing with high traffic areas such as corridors, busy reception areas and areas beside lift entrances and photocopier machines.   As this involves using strong chemicals we would recommend using experienced and trained cleaners to prevent damage to the floor by wrong use.

Whatever type of floor you have in your workplace we can advise on the most appropriate ways of providing both daily cleaning and long term care and protection of your floor.  Although these are two different issues good planning ahead can mean we integrate them into one floor cleaning schedule that will provide the most appropriate cleaning for your office or other workplace floor.