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| Thursday, July 29, 2010 |
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| [Thursday, October 12, 2006] |
| We have been asked to strip, seal and refinish a VCT floor in a plant every four months. They want a low maintenance "wet look" finish, but it is impossible to burnish due to time restraints. Please advise. |
| Hard & Resilient Floor Care - albert ruzbarski |
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Rather than attempt to answer your question without all the information I need, Let me ask a few questions that may guide your thinking on this.
First, why would it be necessary to strip, seal, and refinish a floor every four months? What is happening to the finish that you need to remove it so often? Isn’t this frequency proving to be time-consuming, costly, and wasteful? We seldom strip and refinish floors that frequently anymore and if we do it normally would be an indicator of extreme conditions or very heavy abusive traffic or some problem with our floor program, processes or products.
Since a “wet look” is the result of a very smooth reflective surface, where is that going to come from on a traffic-exposed floor without maintenance burnishing? If frequent cleaning and burnishing of the finish are required to maintain a “wet look”, how can the floor ever be considered “low maintenance”?
Then again, what is “low maintenance”? If burnishing requires much less time than stripping and recoating, isn’t burnishing really “low maintenance” in comparison?
If you have the time to strip and refinish every four months, what exactly are the “time restraints” that prevent you from maintaining the floor with the much faster cleaning-burnishing procedure that will produce the look you desire and extend the life of the finish?
Are you using the optimum finish for your application? How many coats of finish are you applying? Is there enough of a base to actually maintain?
How about prevention? Do you have adequate entry matting between areas and at entrances and exits, how often are you dust and damp mopping and what chemicals are you using? What is the daily maintenance program? Is it protecting the floor finish against rapid degradation due to soiling and or scratching so that expensive restoration procedures are postponed? If not, isn’t that the place to start making intelligent changes?
Lynn E. Krafft, ICAN/ATEX Associate Editor
lekrafft@juno.com
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