Floor Care Basics: How to Clean to Protect Your Bottom Line

This article was originally published in Cleaning & Maintenance Management.

When it comes to floor care, it’s important to make a good first impression. Shiny floors are literally a reflection of your business. In fact, it has been shown that facility appearance ratings can drop by as much as 75% if floor shine makes a bad first impression.

The truth is it’s less expensive to maintain a finish than to repair or replace a floor. So, why not heed those words and create a floor care program that shines favorably on your business and protects your bottom line?

The key to achieving clean, attractive looking floors is regular maintenance and choosing the right cleaning products. The following best practices can help keep finished floors looking great year round.

1. Prevention: A floor matting program reduces the amount of soil, dirt and moisture that enters the building. Mats should be located inside and outside the building in high-traffic areas, such as the main entrance to the building and the entryway or foyer. Also, place mats throughout the building – near the steps, the elevator shaft or other strategic areas – to continue to capture incoming dirt. Typically, the more mats you have, the longer the life of the floor will be. 
2. Daily Routine/Maintenance: This should include dust mopping, damp mopping, auto scrubbing, low-speed buffing and high-speed burnishing.
3. Interim Maintenance: This step involves a deep scrub and recoat. First, remove surface damage, then apply floor finish for a fresh new look. This provides shine restoration when buffing/burnishing is not enough.
4. Restorative Care: Why strip and refinish? When the floor has darkened or yellowed and when a scrub and recoat will not give a new appearance, restorative care is the next step, which involves stripping, sealing and refinishing. Be sure to use a high quality stripper and choose the right finish for your floors.

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Advance SC400™ Walk-Behind Scrubber Provides a Highly Productive, Cost-Efficient Solution for Small-Area Cleaning

Advance introduces the SC400™ walk-behind automatic scrubber, designed to bridge the gap between labor-intensive mops and buckets and high-priced, large automatic scrubbers. Featuring a compact size and 6-gallon solution/recovery tank, the SC400 enhances productivity for small-area cleaning, including gas stations, schools and healthcare facilities.

The SC400 maximizes cleaning productivity with a unique center-pivot squeegee system. Employing a gas spring for optimal blade pressure, the squeegee system can effectively pick up solution in both forward and reverse in just one pass—leaving the floors clean, dry and ready for foot traffic faster than alternative solutions. The machine also features fully variable solution control settings, which allows operators to clean for over one hour on a single tank.

Additional benefits include:

• Simple operation with little to no training required via one-touch operation.
• Compact, highly maneuverable design allows cleaning in space-restricted areas.
• Low operating sound level of only 67 dB A meets LEED-EB and GS-42 noise standards and makes daytime cleaning or cleaning of noise-sensitive areas viable.
• Sustainable cleaning is guaranteed with minimal water and detergent use and maintenance-free gel batteries.

The SC400 is ideal for a wide range of applications, including but not limited to schools and universities, hospitals and healthcare facilities, grocery, retail outlets, convenience stores and restaurants.

Cleaning Warehouse Facilities

Frequent deliveries, paired with forklift and foot traffic can lead to dusty, dirty conditions in warehouses and shipping areas. These conditions are unhealthy for personnel, potentially damaging to stored commodities, and difficult to manage due to the size and scope of warehouses—which may span tens of thousands of square feet. Advance industrial floor cleaning equipment works effectively and efficiently, leaving floors clean, attractive and safe for workers.

For example, powerful, rider sweepers or versatile, walk-behind sweepers can effectively clean diverse warehouse facilities.

How ISSA and CIRI Developed The Clean Standard: K-12

This article was originally published in Contracting Profits.

The goal of the ISSA and Cleaning Industry Research Institute (CIRI) Clean Standard: K-12 is to provide schools with a useful tool that will help them objectively measure and monitor the level of cleanliness at their facilities, thereby contributing to the quality of the indoor environment for the benefit of students and staff alike.

The Clean Standard: K-12 is performance-oriented and focused on:

• The levels of cleanliness that can be reasonably achieved
• Recommended monitoring and inspection procedures designed to measure how “clean” a facility is using quantitative measures (i.e., ATP Meters) and traditional methods (i.e., sight, smell, touch)
• How to use these results to evaluate and improve the cleaning processes and products that are critical to maintaining a safe and healthy learning environment for students and staff

The Clean Standard doesn’t specify or favor any particular cleaning process or product. Instead it focuses on achieving the desired level of cleanliness and provides a systematic approach to inspection to ensure “clean” is achieved and maintained.

Read the full article here to learn more the cleaning standard development process.