Floor Care

Source:www.stonediamondtool.com Date:2020/7/22 Read:306

A facility is known for its floor you walk on. First impression is created the moment you enter the facility as floors reflect the style and taste of property you are visiting.

To protect this investment, housekeeping managers need to maintain the appearance and extend the life of the flooring. Proper floor care starts with architects and the interior designers specifying the correct flooring material for its application. Beyond installation, it is up to managers to make sure in-house staff or contracted services maintains the floor in a proper and efficient manner.

Unfortunately, in too many cases, architects specify flooring more for aesthetics and less for functionality, and managers make the mistake of assuming in-house staff or contracted services already know the best cleaning equipment, chemicals, schedules and tasks to keep floors looking their best. Unfortunately, this too often is not the case.

Professional Solutions for Proper Floor Care:

Proper floor care and maintenance consists of two equally important steps. The first is to identify floor material being used. The second step is developing a program to best care for given flooring efficiently while also keeping labor and supply costs as low as possible. Floor care of any flooring must take into consideration the following conditions:

Traffic. How many people are walking across the floor, and what is being rolled or dragged across the floor?
Environment. What type of soil is being left on the floor?
Congestion. What physical obstacles might hinder floor care procedures?
Time. When can floor care tasks be performed?
Size. What is the square footage of the area to be maintained?

With this information, a manager can develop and implement a comprehensive program to insure floors consistently look their best.

Equipment Issues:

Technology has changed over the last seven or so years in terms of floor-care equipment, chemicals and supplies. Given these major changes, managers should not assume that a supplier of floor-care equipment and products with 20 years of experience necessarily understands the best ways to maintain floors, especially considering some of the new materials that have entered the market.

Putting a floor finish on everything is not the answer. In fact, it would make sense for the managers to provide written specifications on procedures, chemicals, supplies and equipment to be used, based on current technology, to reduce costs and keep floors looking their best. Given its big-ticket nature, managers would do well to give floor-care equipment extra attention.

Selection of Equipment:

Managers face three major challenges when developing a program to properly care for flooring.

Before addressing these challenges, though, managers have one hurdle to clear: changing the way that people involved in floor care view the process. To change this mind set, managers need to educate themselves about trends and encourage in-house housekeeping staff or contracted services to change the way they perform floor care.

It is amazing how many floor care professionals have never used microfiber mops for dry/wet mopping or floor-finish application, or have no idea what a planetary head machine is. It’s also amazing that, even though manufacturers of floor-care equipment and supplies have improved their products, the typical floor-care technician still performs floor care using equipment and supplies that are outdated, when compared to alternatives available on the market today.

The second challenge is the result of the shrinking floor care budgets. The right cleaning equipment does come with a price tag. Housekeeping departments can’t continue with same old limited resources.

The third challenge involves improper floor-care procedures that are performed by in-house employees or employees of facility Management Company. Too often, they are using procedures they used 20 years ago and never bothered to update.

For the third challenge, the solution is to provide written specifications of floor care procedures to be performed, as well as the training for in-house employees or contracted services to support these procedures. Ultimately, it will be up to managers to enforce these changes.

For the first and second challenges, the answer is to incorporate recent advances in floor-care equipment into the program. All of the equipment that has come to the market in recent years allows workers to maintain more square feet in a shorter amount of time and to do so more thoroughly.

The decision on equipment use will depend on the size of the area to be maintained and the type of flooring. Any size area, whether it has hard or soft flooring, will benefit from the use of backpack vacuum cleaners. Also, hard-surface floors will benefit from the use of microfiber mops to remove wet or dry soil.

Cleaning contractors can continue to use standard, corded electric floor-care equipment, including a rotary floor machine, a wet vacuum, and a high-speed burnisher, in areas smaller than 1,500 square feet. In areas larger than 1,500 square feet, managers should consider specifying the use of higher-production equipment, such as autoscrubbers, battery or propane burnishers, propane finish strippers, battery sweepers, and planetary movement carpet care equipment.

Housekeeping managers trying to ensure that cleaning crews have the proper equipment should consider these recommendations to protect the large investments made in high quality flooring.

Hard floors

• backpack vacuums
• microfiber mopping systems, both wet and dry
• microfiber finish application systems
• ride-on sweepers
• walk-behind sweepers
• ride-on scrubbers
• walk-behind scrubbers
• high-pressure tile and grout cleaning equipment
• battery-powered burnishers
• floor-finish strippers
• stone care and restoration equipment.

Soft floors

• backpack vacuums
• ride-on sweepers
• Carpet extractors
• effective and most appropriate carpet cleaning solutions
• planetary-movement carpet care equipment
• downward-flow carpet air movers.