If you’ve ever tried to clean a kitchen or restroom floor by hand you know the benefits of a professional tile and grout machine. Maintaining any floor is hard work. Floors are the biggest surface in a building. They take a literal beating every day and must still look good.

But a tile and grout floor present special challenges for your maintenance team.

Tile and grout floors offer a lot of benefits. They can also be tricky to maintain. Here’s why professionals rely on industrial tile and grout cleaning machines to do the work quickly and completely.

Challenges of Tile and Grout Cleaning

A classic combination, tile and grout is a popular choice for commercial restrooms and professional kitchens. The duo offers a lot of benefits over other flooring options. Ceramic and porcelain tiles are attractive, incredibly durable, and stand up well to heavy foot traffic and rolling loads. They do not attract or hold on to dirt, dust, or allergens and are impervious to water and stains. 

The grout between the tiles, however, is another story. A mixture of cement, aggregate, water, and sand, grout fills the gaps around floor tiles to stabilize and protect them. The material is softer than the surrounding tiles and highly porous. Grout also sits lower than the tile.

This makes tile and grout cleaning really hard to do, especially with a mop and bucket. Dry, porous grout absorbs and holds on to dirt and spills. The soiled grout lines then attract smelly bacteria that feed on the trapped bits of food and urine. Mops cannot pull those soils or bacteria out of the grout, but they do deposit more dirty water on top of the mess. To make matters worse, the lower grout lines act like tiny squeegees pulling even more dirty water out of the mop.

The result is stubbornly stained floors with smelly, darkened grout.

Benefits of a Professional Tile and Grout Cleaning Machine

To avoid this outcome, and the complaints that come with it, professional maintenance teams rely on industrial tile and grout cleaning machines. These tools actually pull dirt and impurities out of the grout. Pair them with the right chemistry and grout and tile floors in commercial kitchens and restrooms will look good and perform well for their entire lifespan.

In a commercial kitchen the main cleaning challenge is dealing with greasy residue. A professional tile and grout cleaning machine like the UniVac® compact floor cleaning machine by Kaivac lets workers combat grease by:

• Dispensing correctly diluted degreasing cleaning chemical
• Providing a brush for spreading the chemical and agitating grout lines
• Employing a powerful vacuum to fully remove dirt and sticky grease from tiles and grout

In commercial restrooms urine and other organic soils are the main cleaning challenge. An industrial tile and grout cleaning machine, like the No-Touch Cleaning® system by Kaivac allows workers to:

• Dispense the correct amount of diluted cleaning or disinfecting chemical
• Blast soils out of the grout lines with a powerful, built-in indoor pressure washer
• Suck up the slurry of soil and water with a robust wet/dry vacuum

In both cases, these professional tile and grout cleaning machines fully remove dirt, soils, and bacteria-attracting residue. The powerful vacuum leaves floors dry, cutting on the risk of disruptive, dangerous slip and fall accidents. Plus, the process is fast and easy to do.

Your tile and grout floors should look good, smell fresh, and perform well. If not it’s time to trade your current cleaning method in for a professional tile and grout cleaning machine. Click here for more floor cleaning solutions by Kaivac.