Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Cleaning Stone Floors


November 22, 2006

Today my experience in the world of CLEAN lead me to a Stone Floor. In other words a non-resilient floor with some natural aggregate base.

What did I learn?
Ceramic Tile does not always want to give up dirt!

How did I solve it?
Every time I encounter a difficult cleaning circumstance I work from experience. The truth is that if I had not been in the industry for the past twenty years I may have spun my wheels for hours trying to solve what actually ended up being a simple clean.

Where stone floors are concerned I always try one product before all others. Why? History has shown that it will be successful so I know better. For uninformed cleaners the same truth exists. But usually they are way off in their guess. Hence the need for knowledge. I did not start this site to sell myself but....... I do sell cleaning supplies for a living. My first effort was to use the old stand-by: Safetrak. A phosphoric based detergent with great heavy soil removal capabilities.

What happened? Dirt came off of the floor. The end result: NOT GOOD ENOUGH!

I went back to the drawing board. I had heard of a new product that was neutral in PH. It took time to work. A bio-based cleaner with long term success. After the first cleaning which involves nothing more than wet mopping I was impressed a bit. So I repeated the process the next day. And so on and so on for the next week. With a bit of help from the night caretaker of course.

The end result?

A very very clean floor.
I will post the final result next week!