Heysham Tile Cleaning Archives - Tile Doctor Lancashire

Copper Slate Tiled Floor Before and After Cleaning and Sealing Heysham

Rough Copper Slate Tiled Floor Renovated in Heysham

This customer in the coastal village of Heysham had recently had these beautiful Copper Slate Tiles laid by a builder who had been working on the house. As part of the work he also sealed them with a solvent aerosol sealer. Floor tiles experience a lot of wear from foot traffic and as a result the sealer only lasted about two weeks before it had worn off and dirt had started to penetrate the pores of the stone. The photos below were taken two months after they were sealed.

Aerosol sealers are only good for wall Tiles where they experience minimum contact, we usually only recommend their use for shower cubicle or wet rooms and they need constant topping up every 6 months or so. In our experience floor surfaces receive a lot of abrasion from the traffic of shoes and so on which will diminish an aerosol applied sealer very quickly.

Cleaning Rough Copper Slate Tiles

It makes sense to clean tiled floors before applying a sealer otherwise you simply trap the dirt under the seal which will reduce its appearance. So before re-sealing the floor with something more effective it was treated to an abrasive clean using a 200-grit diamond encrusted floor burnishing pad fitted to a weighted buffer machine. The pad was run over the whole floor using water to lubricate and with the machine running at slow speed to reduce splashing.

Next step was to clean the recessed grout which pads can struggle to reach, this was done by applying a dilution of Tile Doctor Pro-Clean along the grout lines and then scrubbing it in with a stiff grout brush by hand. Once done the residue from the tile and grout cleaning was rinsed off the floor with water and then extracted with a wet vacuum.

Sealing Rough Copper Slate Tiles

The floor was left to dry off completely overnight and I returned the next day to re-seal, this time with a more suitable product. My sealer of choice for Slate is Tile Doctor Seal and Go which will not only protect the stone from dirt and staining but also adds a very pleasing sheen finish. The new sealer really brought out the black and copper colours in the stone and now looks amazing.

For long-term care I always recommend customers avoid the use of steam cleaners and acidic or strong alkaline cleaning products which can prematurely reduce the life of the sealer resulting in dirt becoming trapped in the pores of the stone again. Naturally Tile Doctor have designed a product for this which is called Tile Doctor Neutral Tile Cleaner, supplied in concentrated form when diluted with water it becomes pH neutral and safe to use on sealed surfaces. I always leave my customers with a complimentary bottle after cleaning their floor, so they are reminded what to use.

Rough Copper Slate After Cleaning Heysham

Professional Slate Floor Maintenance in Lancashire

Rough Copper Slate Tiled Floor Renovated in Heysham Read More »

Amtico Vinyl Floor Tiles Cleaned and Sealed in a Heysham Kitchen

1 Comment / Heysham Tile Cleaning, Vinyl Tile Cleaning, Work History / Russell Taylor

Photographs below from the maintenance of Amtico Vinyl Floor Tiles in the kitchen of a house in the village of Heysham which is famous for its ferry port that has links to the Isle of Man and Ireland. This Vinyl wasn’t that dirty but it was starting to lose its sheen and when this happens it’s an indication that the sealer has started to wear down leaving it looking patchy in the high traffic areas. Once the sealer has failed then dirt will start to accumulate making it look less appealing, so my customer decided to call Tile Doctor in before it got to that point.

It wasn’t a big area and unlike a clay or Stone tile, Vinyl is a lot less porous and can be cleaned and sealed within the same day rather than leave it do dry overnight or even longer. This means less hassle for the customer and a better price for doing the work as well. As a guideline, a 10m2 floor area usually takes around two to three hours to deep clean and re-seal, naturally the larger the area the longer it takes.

Deep Cleaning Amtico Vinyl Floor Tiles

We started with a deep cleaning product developed for Tile Doctor called Vinyl strip which as well as leaving a pleasant floral aroma is biodegradable and phosphate free. You dilute the concentrate with ten parts of water to 1 part Vinyl Strip or if you prefer a litre of water to 100ml of product. This was mixed together in a clear container and then applied to the area to be cleaned. It’s left to soak into the floor for a while so it can break down any remaining old sealer and dirt and then scrubbed in using a deck brush.

I find a wet vacuum machine invaluable at this point at this junction, mopping is okay but you really need to make sure all the product is extracted off the surface to be sealed otherwise it will do to the new sealer what it has done to the old. We call this process Neutralisation and a good rinse with fresh water also helps as does having an industrial air mover in place to help speed dry the floor.

Sealing Amtico Vinyl Floor Tiles

You can’t seal the Vinyl until the tiles are dry as dampness can cloud the sealer so if you don’t have an air blower we recommend leaving the floor for six to eight hours. Our air mover is quite large and it soon had the floor dry so we could move onto sealing quite quickly and applied three coats of Vinyl Shine which gave the floor a nice sheen. Each coat must dry out before the next coat can be applied but it’s worth doing correctly as each coat builds up another layer of protection on the Vinyl, again we used an Air blower to speed up the drying process.

Amtico Vinyl After Cleaning and Sealing in Heysham

Amtico Vinyl Floor After Care

Once dried we left the customer with a free bottle of Tile Doctor PH Neutral Tile Cleaner for the regular cleaning of the floor. We always recommend this product for the regular cleaning of sealed surfaces as it’s PH neutral and won’t degrade the sealer like most domestic cleaning products you find on supermarket shelves.

Maintaining Amtico Vinyl Floor Tiles in Lancashire

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Lancashire Tile Doctor

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