Things happen big time to specialty flooring used in sports, fitness, and the performing arts. You want your floors safe, your clients, customers, and students sound, and your investment secure. You need to create a floor maintenance schedule.
Number one on the agenda is keeping your floor surface clean on a consistent basis.
All floors get dirty. Dust, dirt, sweat, shoe marks, food, soda, and gum are the prime offenders. The more the floor is used, the more it needs to be cleaned.
A mistake people make is they think what they do at home also applies to studio or stage. Not so. Cleaning materials and applications created for home use are not appropriate for commercial and professional situations. Specialty floors are subject to much more wear, tear and environmental punishment. They may need special protective finishes. The desired aesthetics and coefficient of friction are very different from your floors at home. You need a general purpose, mid-range PH (measures acidity and alkalinity) detergent/degreaser. It cleans without destroying finishes and without leaving any surface residue.
In fact, many cleaners leave a residue on the floor to make it shiny or resistant to dirt. When you use a cleaner that leaves a residue of any kind, you inevitably change the coefficient of friction. If you use the inappropriate cleaning agent, your floor becomes stickier or more slippery after application. If there is one thing you want in a specialty movement floor, it is consistency. Supermarket products are not what you want. Better to shop in a hardware store offering industrial cleaning supplies.
Stagestep offers 3 detergent/degreaser products: ProClean, ProClean NS, and FloorShield Finish Cleaner. Each can be used with a mop or a floor cleaning machine, usually with an aqua or green pad. The two bucket technique is more effective and efficient if you use a mop. One bucket using warm water and containing the detergent/degreaser; the second bucket contaings just plain warm water.
Put the mop in the detergent bucket, ring out (you never want to put excess water on any floor surface,) and mop your floor. Rinse out the mop in the second bucket, then repeat. When you use most detergents/degreasers with a high concentration of water, you will not have to rinse your floor. At the very least, you will have picked up the dust, dirt, grime and sweat.
