Marble floor cleaning can be time-consuming and expensive when your custodial crew uses autoscrubbers for the job. When you factor in the purchase price, maintenance costs, and possibility of damaging the natural stone, autoscrubbers prove impractical for many business owners. Here’s how to keep your marble floors pristine with simpler equipment at far lower operating costs.
Challenges of Cleaning Marble Floors
Expensive marble flooring requires special care during cleaning. According to the Marble Institute of America (MIA), regular vacuums can scratch the surface, and mops are inadequate for preventing cross-contamination. Even when you have an autoscrubber to clean the floors without scratching the finish, the chemical cleaners, sealants, and other products you use to clean and finish your marble floors can eventually leave the surfaces looking dull and lifeless.
As with any type of flooring, it takes an understanding of marble’s makeup to know the best way to clean it. According to the MIA, marble is a calcareous, metamorphic natural stone. In practical terms, this means that the harsh scrubbers and acidic cleaners used for maintenance can easily damage marble surfaces, because they aren’t pH neutral. Acidic products eat away at marble, and products with more base leave a dull, unsightly film. Additionally, the practice of dust mopping, which involves dragging sand and dirt over the floor, often leads to scratching.
Other issues include the maintenance costs and labor hours dedicated to your building’s marble floors. Autoscrubbers may remove most of the soils that settle on floors, but the trade-off in time—including the time to dust and trail mop—and the expense of maintaining the equipment could force you to cut corners when cleaning other areas. If you damage a floor’s finish with a cleaning system that uses excessive force, refinishing the marble surface becomes another high floor-care expense.
Safe Solutions for Marble Floor Cleaning
One of the most efficient ways to make cleaning your marble floors easier is to minimize how dirty they get in the first place. Put down a set of textured floor mats in your building’s entrance to encourage customers to wipe their feet, which reduces the amount of soil and abrasive street debris tracked onto your marble floors.
The Kaivac AutoVac removes soils as effectively as an autoscrubber but without the abrasiveness and high levels of chemical content in the cleaning solution. This makes it much safer to use with marble floors than competing systems are. Without the need to trail mop, the AutoVac reduces the amount of time custodians have to spend cleaning your building’s floors and helps you avoid the scratching and dulling that can result from old-fashioned cleaning systems. Kaivac’s gentle, pH neutral cleaning agent allow you to maintain your marble floors with fewer finishing products as time passes.
The AutoVac’s gentler, faster system offers a comprehensive cleaning method without running up your budget for custodial services. Instead of continuing with a system that could be dulling or scratching your expensive marble, it’s important to do your research and invest in the right tools for maintaining this beautiful stone.
For more about the AutoVac and the innovative Kaivac AutoVac Stretch green cleaning machine, explore our products section.
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