Eco-Friendly Flooring: Cleaning and Maintenance
Don’t forget eco-friendly maintenance for your flooring. You’ve chosen eco-friendly flooring. It might be hardwood, bamboo, or cork. And you’ve made sure that that it was installed using eco-friendly materials and methods that maintain your warranty.
Now you need to care for your floors in a way that maintains their beauty, maintains their value, and helps preserve the environment. You need to do three things. You need to prevent damage to your flooring. You need to care for it regularly. And you need to choose eco-friendly cleaning products.
Prevent Damage to Your Flooring
There are several simple things you can do to prevent damage to your beautiful flooring. Our professional installers will probably show you the basics before they leave your home.
Protect your floor from the furniture. Put felt pads under all your furniture. If there are castors on any furniture, choose the kind that are “hardwood-friendly.” Ask our flooring professionals if you’re not sure.
The dirt and grit you track in from outside can damage your floors. Tracking dirt across the floor is almost the same as rubbing sandpaper across the floor.
Prevent that by placing doormats or rugs wherever you enter your home from the outside. Avoid rubber-backed mats that don’t breath. And remember what your mother told you. Wipe your feet when you come inside.
Spills can damage your flooring, too. You’ll never prevent spills, but you can prevent some of the damage they can cause by placing rugs in the kitchen or other places where spills are likely. When they do happen, clean them up quickly and completely.
Keep your indoor environment “flooring-friendly.” The temperature should be between 20 and 24 degrees C with humidity between 40 and 60 percent. Shield your floor from strong light.
Care for Your Flooring Regularly
A famous architect once said that “God is in the details.” Nowhere is that more true than in maintaining the beauty and value of your floors. The secret is lots of little things.
Set up a regular cleaning routine. Sweep or vacuum the floor every few days. This keeps dirt from getting ground into the surface.
Clean your floor regularly. This should be every two to four weeks if the floor gets a lot of traffic. If your floor gets light use, then cleaning every two months will probably be fine.
Ask us to be sure. Try to make this a regular habit, you’re more likely to do it that way.
Choose Eco-Friendly Products
When you clean your flooring you want to choose the best products for your flooring and the planet. One part of that is very easy.
Don’t clean your floor with anything except the products and methods that the manufacturer recommends. That assures you of choosing the right products for the floor you purchased. And it will help assure that your warranty remains in force.
That’s the easy part. The hard part is sorting out what products are truly eco-friendly. Since they’re no common definition of the term, you’re going to have to do a little research by reading product labels. Here are some ingredients that can cause problems for both people and the environment.
- Cresol
- Formaldehyde
- Nitrobenzene
- Perchloroethylene
- Phenol
- Toluene
- Xylene
Be sure to check the pH of any cleaning product. That’s the measure of how corrosive a chemical is when compared to water. Water has a pH of 7. A solution with a pH below 4 is probably too acidic for your floors. One with a pH above 10 is probably too alkaline. Either one can damage your lovely floors.
One result of the increasing concern of many people about how their choices affect the planet is that there’s more information about eco-friendly alternatives than ever before. Every day it gets easier to find out what’s in that cleaning product you’re considering.
Your flooring is a big investment so you want to do everything you can to maintain their beauty and value while you do what’s best for the planet. Regular professional care can make that easier and more effective.
If you live in the Greater Toronto Area, you can benefit from TipTop Flooring’s professional care services. We can help you maintain the value of your flooring and correct problems early. Ask your Flooring Consultant about a customized care plan.
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