1 Commercial Flooring Report February 2019

By: Dane Gregory and Lew Migliore, an associate of LGM, is the National Sales Manager for Carpet Cleaner America. He works with commercial cleaners to help them build their businesses by adding services without a lot of additional cost. He has helped many facili-ties get a handle on their maintenance staff and budget. He also helps with technical as-pects of cleaning carpet, tile and stone surfaces. He instructs classes for each floor sur-face as well as the Commercial Cleaning Initiative, which includes all these floor surfaces. He can be reached at dane@carpetcleaner-usa.com or through LGM.

Hard surface flooring is all the rage whether it’s some form of vinyl with a wood or stone pattern and tex-ture or engineered or real wood. The market is exploding with their use. If you attended Surfaces in Las Vegas in January 2019 you saw a massive display of these products. Everybody wants to be in this busi-ness and offer some type of hard surface flooring but, as I’ve said here repeatedly, nobody knows a lot about this product. When it comes to cleaning it there’s even less known about it. Once these products get installed in a building, it’s discovered that they are more difficult to clean than other vinyl flooring such as VCT or hard surface tiles of any sort and here’s why. The new LVT and LVP flooring is pro-duced with a stunning photograph of different species of wood, tile and stone. Recesses in the material will allow soils to find their way down deep into the recesses of the wear layer becoming difficult to re-move with standard cleaning tools. Let’s first look at a brief history on floor maintenance issues. Flat floors are much easier to service be-cause the tools most used in floor maintenance are also flat. Rotary brushes, new microfiber mop sys-tems and squeegees used on automatic floor scrubbing machines are all very flat. Floors that give maintenance professionals and floor buy-ers/owners headaches are floors that are not flat. And yes, while we’re at it, we can lump carpet into the group of floors that are not flat that give many cleaning professionals and buyers/owners difficulty. One of the challenges with Luxury vinyl tile and plank and any of the other highly textured hard surface flooring materials so common today, is getting them clean. Effectively cleaning these types of hard surface flooring materials has come up repeatedly especially on construction projects where the flooring is installed before all the finishing work is completed. Soiling is especially severe when there is still drywall work going on after the new flooring has been installed. Even if the floors are covered, the dust from sanding drywall seams and patch is so fine that it will find its way beneath any protective covering. When the floors are eventually uncovered, if they’re covered at all, the fine dusty white soil reveals itself in the nooks, crannies and crevices of the flooring.

DRYWALL DUST IN WOVEN VINYL

FLOORING TILES

2 Commercial Flooring Report February 2019

Most often the cleaning process for the flooring is to broom sweep them to gather the bulk of the dusty soil or shop vac them and then often wet mopping is used. Even if the flooring is not wet mopped dusty, particulate soil will become imbedded in the texture. Here’s where you run into trouble. Wet mopping a hard surface floor-ing with a textured surface will make a paste of the drywall dust which is then near impossible to remove. We’ve seen this on a multitude of installations especially in new hotels and apartment com-plexes where luxury vinyl planks are used or even wood flooring. It is irrelevant as to the core of these materials, it’s the face of them that presents the challenge. So how should this dusty soil be removed if not with a broom, vacuum, damp or wet mop? Pros need to understand the limiting factors of rotary equipment on these types of floors. If all the bristles on the brush are the same length, how many of the bristles will dive down into the nooks and crannies of the floor? The water-based cleaning solution will travel into those crevices’ and will carry some of the loosened and dissolved soils back into the same space as the flooring dries. One needs the correct type of tool to get into the recessed areas like a machine with cylindrical brushes. The way the brushes contact the flooring the bristles are getting deep into the recesses and moving all the soils out where it can be collected by the machine, dust mop or vacuum. So what can we do with these types of flooring and not have soils re-turn to the low lying areas? We can clean them without water. Dry ab-sorbent compound once thought to only be available for carpet can do the trick. The compound is usually a plant-based carrier like corn or wood flour can be impregnated with detergents and drying agents. The compound then deposits the cleaning agents onto the flooring and then collects soils as the cylindrical brush machine distributes the compound allowing the cleaning agent to access the soils and sus-pend them. Once suspended the compound dries and is collected by the machine if so equipped or a dust mop and suction only vacuum.

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DRY WALL DUST

3 Commercial Flooring Report February 2019

The experience with dry compound for construction cleanup of drywall compound has been very suc-cessful in testing and real-world practice. Drywall dust cleanup into the crevice areas is quite a chal-lenge. Most construction practices allow the flooring to be installed before the wall treatment is finished. This leaves a large amount of drywall product on the floor. Using mops and buckets is still the preferred method of most construction cleanup crews. This puts the drywall mud into solution and that is left in the crevices. More mopping will not clean this floor-ing.

This phenomenon is similar to washing hardwood floors with water but without the danger of getting the wood wet. A pre-finished wood floor can have a huge potential to swell when exposed to even a small amount of water-based cleaning agent. Wood can expand when wet up to four percent across the grain. This is why plank wood floors are only in-stalled in on-grade locations and nailed directly to the wooden substrate. Engineered wood floors can take a bit more moisture as they are cross laminated to minimize any expansion. Site finished floors coat-ed with a polyurethane layer are less susceptible to water intrusion.

Success has been found using the waterless dry compound to not allow the dust to become suspend-ed in the cleaning solution. Dry compound will clean the crevices without reinstating the soils back into the spaces. This method has been done successfully in several locations after regular construction clean-up processes have failed. Soils need to be physically extracted to get deep down cleaning accomplished. Dry compound techniques will complete the extrac-tion of the soils more completely in this particular sit-uation.

Come on over to the dry side when you have a com-plicated floor or need to be as dry as possible to not allow bad things to happen to your natural flooring. And hey I did not even mention what is possible on ceramic tile and grout with compound!! We will save that subject for another article in the future.

4 Commercial Flooring Report February 2019

CLEANED FLOOR ON LEFT

CYLINDRICAL BRUSH MACHINE

DRY COMPOUND COLLECTED WITH SOIL