Proper hard floor care is essential for the health, image, and safety of any facility.A floor care program consisting of preventative, daily, interim, and restorative maintenance not only preserves the life of your facility's floors, it also helps you reduce costs and improve operating efficiencies.
General Hard Floor Care Procedures
Preventative Maintenance
- Keeping floors clean starts outside the building. Remove grass clippings, leaves, and debris from the building's entrance with commercial-grade rakes and high-powered leaf blowers.
- Position weather- and stain-resistant mats outside and inside each building entrance to trap dirt and debris before they reach your floors.
Daily Maintenance
- Remove dirt from floor mats with light-duty push sweepers.
- Sweep floors daily with a clean, durable broom and dust pan, and use a high-visibility sweeping compound for a more thorough clean.
- Vacuum high-traffic areas daily, using a large-area sweeper to maximize productivity and easily move from hard floors to carpets.
- Remove excess dust with a cotton or microfiber dust mop. Apply dust mop treatment to mop heads to ensure all dust and debris adhere.
- Clean floors with a premium wet mop and a neutral floor cleaner . Be sure to choose a floor cleaner compatible with the material and finish of your floor.
Interim Maintenance
- Scrub floors weekly with an automatic scrubber and cleaning solution.
- To remove scuffs and restore gloss to a finished floor, buff, polish, and/or burnish floors with a floor machine or high-speed burnisher and spray buff.
Restorative Maintenance
- Every four to six months, particularly after winter has wreaked its havoc, floors must be stripped and recoated with finish or wax. Choose the appropriate chemical stripper for your floor type and apply with a low-speed floor machine outfitted with a stripping pad. Use a wet/dry vac to remove the slurry left behind by the stripping process.
- Once stripped, apply five to six coats of floor finish with a finish mop, allowing at least 30 minutes of dry time between applications.
Sources
1. http://www.issa.com/articles/article-details/archived/floor-care-tips-from-start-to-re-finish#.V_vZWeArKUk
2. http://www.issa.com/video#29 "The Four Phases of Floor Maintenance"
