Page 1 - 2019-02-CFR Volume 125 - Cleaning Textured Hard Surface Flooring - February 2019
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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 DRYWALL DUST IN WOVEN VINYL
soil reveals itself in the nooks, crannies and crevices of the flooring. FLOORING TILES
1 Commercial Flooring Report February 2019