CM/Spotlight: Hard Floor Care Sponsored by: The Evolution Of Hard Floor Care To truly appreciate the amount of progress, we need to take a closer look at what the idea of cleaning and maintaining hard surface floors was in its infancy. By: Dane Gregory I Dane Gregory is the commercial sales manager for Bridgewater Corporation, which owns Interlink Supply. He works with commercial cleaners to help them build their businesses by adding services with-out a lot of additional cost. Gregory also helps them with the technical aspects of carpet cleaning, tile and grout care and stone surface maintenance. He instructs classes for each floor surface and also teaches “The Commercial Cleaning Initiative” and “The Commercial Boot Camp,” both of which cover all of these floor surfaces. For more information, please visit www. Bridgepoint.com/education. for more info Read additional content on hard floor care. If you look at where we are today compared to where we began, you’ll likely agree that we are light years away from the first attempts to maintain flooring in commercial buildings. Initially, variety was limited; flooring choices for common areas were basically stone, wood or linoleum. All were natural materials, and each had charac-teristics that could cause maintenance headaches. If left unprotected from the scarring effects of foot traffic, the floors would show signs of prema-ture wear and would often need replacement far sooner than anticipated. Even with the advent of vinyl flooring options, the need for sacrificial protective coatings to delay or eliminate the damage from dirt, grit and other soils was apparent. Early protective coatings consisted of natural waxes and polishes, which were difficult to main-tain and proved problematic when a complete strip was necessary. Some of these early products could actually penetrate the pores of the floors and needed to be manually sanded and scrapped off. Can you imagine the time-consuming difficulty and the associated costs of such a labor-intensive process? Almost all hard surface flooring — including ceramic tiles, terrazzo, quarry tile and, in some cases, natural stone — was treated just like vinyl composition tile (VCT) and finish was applied. Back in the Stone Age — no pun intended — most hard floor care operations consisted of rou-tine services like sweeping, mopping and buffing. When those operations were no longer effective, the floor was stripped of its finish — what once was, and is still commonly, called wax — and recoated, which was considered a restorative process. A majority of maintenance programs were basi-cally cleaning processes designed to prolong the time between stripping and refinishing cycles. There was some consideration as to the useful life of the flooring, but early maintenance programs were designed to control the costs of refinishing, which were quite expensive. Sacrificing Appearance To Cut Costs Further intensifying the maintenance headache, early floor finishes had to be matched to the type of equipment available to a contractor or in-house professional. Low-speed finishes — which, by the nature of their formulation, were extremely durable and dif-ficult to abrade — were just not as glossy as the high-speed, thermally-activated finishes that could be burnished to build or repair gloss. With constraints such as floor machines operat-ing at a mere 175 revolutions per minute (RPM), janitors, custodians, maintenance technicians and other cleaning personnel were not able to cross high-gloss finishes with low-speed equipment. Smaller buildings and facilities with tight corri-dors or congested areas could not have floors with the “wet look” that gained popularity in the 1980s because the equipment needed to properly bur-nish the finish was simply too large to maneuver. Also, smaller locations like branch offices or independent medical facilities would often fail to maintain their floors in a timely manner, stretch-ing necessary servicing as far as possible to save money. 12 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • April 2013
CMM – Archives Apr 2013: 12
