Top Tips For Protecting Your Floor During Winter
Although it is widely accepted practice to apply salt and sand on walkways, it might turn out to be extremely harmful for the floor surfaces in your facility. Salt and sand are usually applied in order to prevent people from slipping on snow and ice. The reaction of these substances together might reduce the longevity of floors, while increasing repair and floor care costs, and forcing you to contact a professional. This article will explain some easy steps to prevent something like that from happening before mitigating the water damage problem.
The Importance of Proper Matting and Moisture Levels
In the winter time, it can be inevitable that your customers and employees might track snow into your facility with their shoes. The ice and snow that they introduce to your building eventually melts and turns into puddles of water. One way to mitigate this problem is to implement the use of mats especially at the entrance of your facility. This can potentially reduce the incidences of people slipping and also damage to your floors.
What you can do is place a scraping mat outside the building or in the entry walkways. Unknowingly, customers will engage in removing harmful substances from their shoes unto the mat. Additionally, you can add another absorbent mat on the inside of the building after the scraping mat so that the snow and ice continues to dislodge as they approach the exposed floor. It is important that you use mats with rubber pads so that no one slips on mats and injuries can be avoided.
How to Solve the Sand and Salt Problem
As mentioned earlier, salt and sand particles are used to prevent people from falling on slippery snow and ice surfaces. However, this is a big mistake because it can erode your floor finishes when they are brought into your building with shoes. Whilst the suggested matting can prevent such materials from being brought into your facility, it is imperative that floors are regularly cleaned and buffed because they can cause water to start pooling and melt through the floor wax.
Asphalt is another material that is easily broken off and brought into buildings unknowingly. Thus, it is also equally important that floors are vacuumed regularly to remove such particles and prevent them from ruining the quality of your expensive floors.
Utilize a Good Water Damage Prevention System
- Buy sufficient materials: Be sure to ensure that near the entrance of your facility there is a station that contains all the required maintenance equipment such as mops, vacuums and buckets. It is also important that the station consists of cleaning chemicals that are necessary to maintain your floors.
- Use proper signage: Signage can be extremely useful in such cases because they can communicate with and warn people that your floors are wet, allowing them to proceed with caution. The signs can also inform your customers that is customary to dry their shoes on your installed mats.
- Replace the matting regularly: A good interval between replacing your mats would be about every four hours, especially during periods of heavy snowfall.
The Process Of Water Restoration For Hardwood Floors
As with all furnishings that have went through water damage, time is an extremely important factor. This is especially so for flooring because they can suffer from permanent water damage and mold infestation if no action is taken in a short amount of time. This is because hardwood flooring has the ability to absorb water and moisture very quickly. There are many other factors to consider when we talk about water restoration. For example, the type of wood used for the flooring, the type of finish that was used and the amount of moisture that has seeped into the flooring is important to note. These factors are things that only the professionals know about.
These professionals possess the niche set of skills and knowledge that can help you to restore your hardwood floors to their original state. They also have the necessary equipment that is required for effective drying of the hardwood.
Finding Out the Type of Flooring and Installation
When doing water restoration for hardwood floors, it is always important for the professionals to carry out inspections first. They have to first ascertain the type of flooring that they encounter. For example, it could be made from oak, maple, pine or cherry wood. These days, there are so many different kinds of hardwood materials. It can be difficult to know for sure what the rates of moisture absorption for each type of flooring is.
Professionals have the advantage over the untrained eye because they would know whether or not the flooring is made from real wood. Sometimes these floors have a layer of laminate on their surfaces and that can make drying an even harder process.
How To Dry Hardwood Floors
After the trained professionals have determined what type of wood is being used and the amount of moisture they are dealing with, surface or subsurface drying methods that involve dehumidification of the floors. Often times, they force a constant stream of airflow underneath the floorboards to facilitate and expedite the drying process. This is a long and time-consuming process and can reach up to a week or 10 days for it to be sufficiently dry. The drying is continued until nearly four percent of the wood’s dry standards. From then on, the professionals will allow the flooring to dry naturally.
The Repairing Process
Even after drying the hardwood floors, the experts still have to check if there has been any damage to the wood finish. The finishes might be made from standard floor waxes or polyurethane, and might hinder the drying process. They might also cause cupping of the floor and potentially crack the surfaces. Therefore, the whole hardboard water restoration process is extremely difficult and requires much expertise in this field. It would benefit you to hire proper professionals who have years of experience under their belts.
Here at Reilly’s Oriental Rug Cleaning, we have the most advanced hardwood drying equipment and rug cleaning solutions that can help you in cases of water damage. We offer the most competitive prices and top-notch customer service. Do feel free to contact us to solve any enquiries you might have or book a water restoration package.
Keep Your luxury Vinyl Tiles Looking Brand New
One of the most popular floor surfaces that are being used these days is Luxury Vinyl Tile (LVT). These synthetic vinyl tiles are made to emulate natural surroundings and can be extremely beautiful. However, they have to look nice and clean in any building, otherwise you would be much better off installing a cheaper floor surface. Tiles often add to the aesthetic value of the place and can lead to customers’ or guests’ first impression of you or your facility. It is true that they can become dirty very easily but it is important that you put in the time and effort to keep them looking brand new.
Investing in Floor Care
In order to ensure that your tiles are free from unwanted materials and dirt that can enter your facility, be sure to install a scraping mat at the entrance of your building so that soil and other materials can be removed from people’s shoes. This would prevent your floor from becoming stained and dirty. It is also good to know that this is the cheapest and easiest method to mitigate dirty LVT problems and increasing the longevity of the floor surface.
Daily Maintenance
It is also very important that floors are cleaned and maintained daily. Treat your LVT like any other flooring and you will be fine. Just like you would do for other tiling, utilize dry sweeping and mopping methods so that they can look brand new. Note that you should only use cleaners with a pH of 7, or the more optimal neutral peroxide chemical cleaner. Generally, common sense should tell you that in the case of any spillage, the floors should be cleaned as soon as possible, in order to maintain the standards of the tiles, while reducing the chances of people slipping and falling.
Aggressive Cleaning
If you happen to have smooth LVT in your facility, you should invest in a rotary disk automatic scrubber that comes with a light scrub pad and the aforementioned neutral peroxide cleaner. The scrubber will serve as a means to remove any remaining dirt after sweeping and mopping.
Textured LVT Cleaning
Cleaning textured LVT surfaces is slightly different from the smooth surfaces. The rotary disk automatic scrubber should still be used. However, you should equip the scrubber with a light duty and all-purpose scrub brush. Similarly, you should also use a peroxide-based chemical cleaner for the scrubber. Textured LVT surfaces have to be maintained more thoroughly because it can lose its aesthetic appeal and refined look if it is not cleaned properly.
Should You Coat Your LVT?
Many LVT manufacturers believe in coating the tiles with some sort of protective finish. This helps to make the flooring appear glossy, while providing protection to its surface. Although there are benefits to coating your LVT, it might be hard to ensure that the finish can adhere to the tiles, and to strip the finish without damage being done to the LVT.
Reilly’s Oriental Rug Cleaning can help you with making your LVT look as impressive as it should with our premium tile and grout cleaning services. We have a team of professionals who work tirelessly and who have years of experience under their belts. What are you waiting for? Do not hesitate to contact our friendly customer service staff to book an appointment or simply enquire about this matter.
How NOT To Vacuum Your Carpets
Although it might be considered an annoying chore, people who own carpets do not have a choice but to vacuum their carpets in order to keep them clean. It is an activity that might be time consuming and troublesome, so in order to optimize the way that you use your vacuum cleaner, you have to understand the most effective way to utilize this machine. Below are some ways in which you should NOT vacuum your carpets.
Using Dirty Filters
It is imperative that you follow the instructions on the manual that comes with the vacuum cleaner. This is because in order to ensure that your vacuum cleaner is working at optimal efficiency, its filters need to be clean. Filters are the part of the vacuum cleaner that are used to store the dirt and dust which the vacuum cleaner has sucked in. Not cleaning out the filter every once in a while will make the machine work at a more inefficient rate, while raising the chances of the collected dirt to be spread around the house. This would be detrimental to the cleanliness of your house, waste your time in vacuuming, and also might act as a health hazard to the people living with you.
Reusing the Vacuum Cleaner Bag
Many people have tried to save on costs by reusing vacuum bags. Although the intentions of doing this might be good in the case where people are trying to be more environmentally friendly by reusing, vacuum bags should never be reused. Experts on vacuum cleaners warn that reusing these bags can also reduce the machine’s efficiency by half, while increasing the probability of your vacuum cleaner spoiling faster. This can be attributed to the fact that as the bag becomes more clogged, the vacuum receives less airflow, and the motor has to compensate by working harder.
Never Adjust the height Of Your Vacuum Cleaner
In this modern day and age where technology is so advanced, you would hardly find a vacuum cleaner that does not have the option of adjustable height. This is important because carpets are usually higher than the flooring. Some high-tech vacuum cleaners can do this automatically, but even if yours does not have this automatic function, it is only wise to adjust the height accordingly as it will allow you to improve the cleanliness of your house.
Overfilling Vacuum Cleaners that Don’t Have Bags
The fact that your vacuum cleaner is bagless does not mean that it can be filled all the way to the brim. Ensure that your vacuum is not filled up completely before removing the collected dirt so that the vacuum cleaner can perform at maximum efficiency and you also do not have to worry about dust spreading to the rest of your house.
Not Vacuuming Surfaces More Than Once
This might take up more of your time, but if you want to ensure that your carpeted surfaces are cleaned as thoroughly as can be, you should vacuum them more than once. Experts and manufacturers say that this is because the fibers in the carpet can become twisted in more than one direction. Therefore, going over the carpet twice or more can increase the probability of sucking up more dirt that is stuck in between these fibers.
Here at Reilly’s Oriental Rug Cleaning, we offer a wide range of rug and carpet cleaning services that have been proven to be extremely helpful to our customers. Do feel free to contact our friendly and personal support staff if you happen to have any enquiries regarding carpet vacuuming!