true or false when it comes to tile and grout..

Mikey P

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Something to chew on, your female clients place far more emphasis on their floor smelling and feeling great then they do stains in the grout. Our industry needs to stop obsessing with using high pH chemistry, acids and 1500 to 2500 PSI to get floors cleaned to OUR standards. All three of these actions will often cause serious damage to floors, add lots of extra time to the cleaning project and thus raise the prices of hard surface floor care to an amount that most homeowners can’t afford to do on a regular basis. Most of today's popular tiles have patterns so busy that a stain or three is never noticed or worried about by Mrs Piftleton.
 

Jim Pemberton

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Something to chew on, your female clients place far more emphasis on their floor smelling and feeling great then they do stains in the grout. Our industry needs to stop obsessing with using high pH chemistry, acids and 1500 to 2500 PSI to get floors cleaned to OUR standards. All three of these actions will often cause serious damage to floors, add lots of extra time to the cleaning project and thus raise the prices of hard surface floor care to an amount that most homeowners can’t afford to do on a regular basis. Most of today's popular tiles have patterns so busy that a stain or three is never noticed or worried about by Mrs Piftleton.

Hard floors hold more odor than people notice until after cleaning, especially kitchens. Frequent mopping, “swiffering” etc makes floors sticky too.

Women seem to be more attuned to “feels good and smells good” than “looks good”.
 
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Jim Pemberton

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" this whole brush glide thing is big fvcking deal for our industry"


Over 50 years of watching this industry evolve has taught me a thing or two.

We tend to become enamored with the first technology that solves a problem, and then we find wasy to either improve upon, or cheapen, that idea, and we wear blinders that block out other possibilities.

Spinner heads are one such example.

Before they hit the market, the few hard surface specialists cleaned tile and grout with scrubbers and rinsed with “brush head wands” using neutral or mildly alkaline stone cleaning products.

Those people got great results.

LVP and “crappy glazed porcelain” (whatever you want to call it) are bringing about the need to look at what worked so well back then.

“Spinners” are great for greasy and gross work, if that’s your thing.

But in my view, most jobs will clean fine, and more safely, without them.
 
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Mikey P

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“Spinner heads” are one such example.

Before they hit the market, the few hard surface specialists cleaned tile and grout with scrubbers and rinsed with “brush head wands” using neutral or mildly alkaline stone cleaning products.

Those people got great results.

LVP and “crappy glazed porcelain” (whatever you want to call it) are bringing about the need to look at what worked so well back then.

“Spinners” are great for greasy and gross work, if that’s your thing.

But in my view, most jobs will clean fine, and more safely, without them.
Yeah I greasy and gross is not my thing and either of our locations 90% of the carpet I cleaned doesn't even need prescribing just a few minutes of dwell time and great winding technique.

If my tile floors need two tools and two types of chemistry and scrubbing in between each step and rather just pass at this point in my illustrious career
 

Desk Jockey

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Its definitely and improvement and the switching from glide to brush is a great feature. 😎

A big fookin deal? Maybe for some.

We have used brush wands on all our cleaning trucks for decades.
 

Jim Pemberton

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e have used brush wands on all our cleaning trucks for decades.

Exactly my point:

We need to get back to where we were with floor techology the way it is today.

And because the existing hard floor brush wands stink
 

Desk Jockey

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I agree. They were a pain to keep the brush clean and especially the jets.

It also required room for another wand.

Your design is a much better idea. Switch would be much better than 2-wands. Although if it came to notching, they would probably still use a second dedicated wand.
 
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Mikey P

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PXL_20210721_161517760.MP~2.jpg
 
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Tom Forsythe

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Has the change occurred because the polyester carpet does not look new again after cleaning while the tile & grout with some small stains looks great by comparison? Has it also changed as most tile & grout floors have been restored and only need maintenance cleaning after that initial deep cleaning? The IICRC and forums should lead the industry towards moderation of chemistry and pressure.

When we first introduced Viper Renew (acid), I thought that we would sell 1 gallon of Renew for 10 gallons of Viper Venom (alkaline). Boy was I wrong, it ended up being 1 gallon Viper Renew for every 3 gallons of Viper Venom. We recently introduced Viper Venom II with less alkalinity and solvency focusing on safer surfactants. It has done well and could be the trend toward less alkalinity. Viper 7 remains a neutral degreaser that rinses very well. This product also fits the outline that Mike laid out. We have always suggested 800 psi for use with SX-12 or Turbos.
 

Jim Pemberton

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The IICRC and forums should lead the industry towards moderation of chemistry and pressure

I have a customer who nearly lost his feet due to chemical burns that lead to staph infection from a highly alkaline cleaner he was using for greasy quarry tile.

His footwear wasn't appropriate for the work to be clear, but he was using a masonry cleaner designed for exterior use and it soaked through his sneakers and the chemical burns followed.

Trending away from these products will be far safer for our industry.
 

Cleanworks

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We need good effective scrubbers that easily get into the grout lines. It's a pain doing them by hand. CRB or 175 seems to skim the surface and not able to get into the deeper grout lines. Maybe a better staggered brush or something. Then you can rinse using a brush glide with any machine.
 
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Bob Savage

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I have been using the Turbo 4-jet swivel wand, with their double brush swivel wand head (brush in front of and the back of the swivel head), at 750 PSI and 240.

Outstanding results, and much less fatigue than manhandling a spinning Turbo on those big tile jobs.
 

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