How Often Should I Clean my Tile and Grout (or stone slab floor)
For commercial readers:
This depends on the nature of your business, but I’ll give you two examples with two very different levels of traffic and how often they should be cleaned by a professional.
Business 1: A busy fast food chain that serves oily food (in this case lets say fried chicken) On top of your staff’s daily mopping, these types of businesses with heavy foot traffic and a lot of internal contamination of their tile and grout should consider having a professional clean done no less than once a month. Oily buildup from restaurants being ground in to tile or stone becomes stiff and hard to remove the longer it goes on, we find that anything past one month will actually cost you more for less frequent treatments due to the specialty chemicals and longer labour times that will be required once the oil has set in and started to form a full on layer. The other reason to do this more often is if your tile isn’t sealed with a high quality saturating sealer like Stain-Proof Sealer installed by Craig and Company Contracting, dirt mixed with oils can cause permanent and unfixable staining. On top of that, days which are rainy outside and giving your clientele soggy shoes on top of an oily floor can cause a very dangerous and slippery surface which can lead to lawsuits, easily preventable with a professional Tile and Grout Cleaning treatment.
Business 2: A digital marketing firm that doesn’t have many customers in person. This type of business depending on how many employees and the size of the location can likely keep pretty tidy with self maintenance mopping when done correctly, or performed by a high quality janitorial service. With that, they likely only need their tile and grout or slab stone floor professionally deep cleaned every 6 months. Mopping can only do so much, and most people don’t do it correctly, so there will be some amount of dirt left behind even if you’re wet mopping your facility daily, so to keep things hygienic and sharp looking for the clients which do come in sometimes, we recommend our clients to clean every 6 months but some people decide to stretch it out to a year if the budget is tight for maintenance activities.
For any professional business, we recommend keeping it clean as its far less expensive than replacing worn down or stained tiles and stones. The other way to keep your floors looking newer longer is to invest in a high quality sealer designed for your floor type like Stain-Proof tile and stone sealers installed by a qualified and accredited applicator like Craig and Company Contracting in Vancouver, BC. Sealers are best applied on new floors, so don’t delay as every day is just further deteriorating your stone and tile which can be quickly and effectively protected with a high quality sealant.
Residential Readers:
You keep your home clean and tidy, but no matter what you do your floors still build up dirt, even though you use one of those “wet mopping pads” daily on your tile and grout or stone. Well, its ok, you’re not doing anything wrong its due to the soap residue left behind by residential cleaning chemicals that don’t get rinsed away, and to make matters worse those all surface “wet mop” pads (the ones in the little green plastic tub… you know the ones) contain a small amount of murphy oil to make wood look shiny, and give people a slight illusion of a surface cleaner than it is. Unfortunately, this oil buildup is bad for stone and tile, and drags dirt and traps it deep down in the pores of the surface.
So how often should you have a professional come clean your tile and grout, or stone floors in your home. Well, at Craig and Company we recommend our clients to have us come in and do a deep clean once a year, and while we’re there we can give you some tips and tricks on how to keep it cleaner longer; as well as some advice on choosing the right cleaning products for your specific floor type. We also recommend at your first service that we install high quality Stain-Proof brand sealer, designed for your stone or tile and grout, to help keep dirt from getting down in the pores and become hard to remove, as well as protect from the harmful oil that’s in many residential cleaning products. Stain-Proof brand sealers are guaranteed by warranty on residential properties for 15-25 years depending on the sealer, but only when installed by an accredited specialist applicator like the pro’s at Craig and Company Contracting in Vancouver, BC.
How do professionals deep clean tile and grout if mopping leaves dirt behind?
A high quality maintenance contractor or professional deep cleaning service for tile and grout or natural stone floors in your home and business will do a 2 step cleaning method if they know what they’re doing.
Step 1: spray and scrub, they’ll gently apply a specialty cleaning solution designed for removing grease and oils from the fine pores of your tile and stone floor, a really good cleaner will use a pricier but safer EcoLogo Certified cleaning chemical for the health and safety of you, your family, and your pets. Then, they’ll use a specialty no splatter scrubbing machine that uses soft scratchless scrubbing brushes that move in a particular motion so as to not spray any of the dirty solution on any of the other surfaces in the area.
Step 2: The specialty cleaning technician will perform whats known as “hot water extraction” on the tile and grout or stone floor in your building, this works in a similar way to pressure washing but specifically designed to work inside with no mess. It uses pressurized water heated to 210 degrees, then at the edge of the cleaning tools head there is a suction area connected to a very high strength vacuum to quickly suck up all the dirty cleaning solution and rinse water all in one pass. This method leaves no mess, no spray on other surfaces in the home, and dries quickly as it recovers over 99% of the liquid used in cleaning.