Snow & Ice Always Present Floor Cleaning Challenges
If you remained open after our most recent bout of snow you probably have some pretty dirty floors. Chances are you did all the normal things to clear your entryways and prevent slips and falls like shoveling away the snow and putting down rock salt or some other de-icing agent. Maybe you even placed an additional floor mat or two down to reduce people tracking in debris and water. Even with all of your preparation you still ended up with sand, salt and a variety of other smudges and stains on your carpets and hard floors.
What Happens To Your Floors After A Snowstorm
One of the biggest issues that the floors experience during snow is rock salt & ice-melt. Using these materials is critical to keeping the risk of falls at bay, but they destroy floors. If rock salt is used it will get in and inevitably find its way to a wet spot. From there it will melt and eat away at the finish on hard floors, decimate the fibers in your carpet or disintegrate layers off of your concrete.
Your floors also experience much heaver saturation of grit and dirt. Even if you add extra mats to try to keep it out, it still gets in. When people track in grit it is like replacing their shoe soles with sandpaper on your hardfloors and because it is small it can get deep into your carpets leaving all kinds of lovely stains.
Top this all off with the added moisture and you have a trifecta of pain for your carpets and hardfloors. So what do you do?
Cleaning Your Carpets & Hardfloors During & After Snowfall
The best thing you can do is have a winter floor care plan in place before the winter months as this will decrease the need for reactive care. Typically the best thing to do is to put your plan together in the fall but even with the addition of floor sealing products, extra layers of floor finish and heavy duty floor mats you will still need to increase day to day cleaning. Increased dry mopping, vacuuming, wet mopping and general cleaning is a must.
The day after the heavy snowfall is the most important as this is the day that the salt or other de-icing agent will come into play. Make sure to contact a professional floor cleaning company as well as a carpet cleaner to perform a proper cleaning of your floors. Professional floor companies have salt neutralizing solutions and heavy duty carpet cleaning equipment. Without these tools it is very difficult to make sure that your floors have received the care they need.
Building maintenance is tough during the winter and floors present a laundry list of challenges but proper care and maintenance reach beyond the aesthetic and can give your floors a longer lifespan. This will keep costs down and moral up!