Floor cleaning - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Floor cleaning is a major occupation

Employment

Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. An employee may be defined as:- Employee :...

throughout the world. The main job of most cleaner

Cleaner

Cleaner is the name of a German project specializing in electronic music. Formerly known as Cleen, Myer released several albums on the American industrial music record label, Metropolis Records, as well as the labels Zoth Ommog and Accession Records....

s is to clean floor

Flooring

Flooring is the general term for a permanent covering of a floor, or for the work of installing such a floor covering. Floor covering is a term to generically describe any finish material applied over a floor structure to provide a walking surface...

Reasons for cleaning floors

The principal reasons for floor cleaning are:

To prevent injuries
Injury
-By cause:*Traumatic injury, a body wound or shock produced by sudden physical injury, as from violence or accident*Other injuries from external physical causes, such as radiation injury, burn injury or frostbite*Injury from infection...

due to tripping or slipping. Injuries due to slips and trips on level floors are a major cause of accidental
Accident
An accident or mishap is an unforeseen and unplanned event or circumstance, often with lack of intention or necessity. It implies a generally negative outcome which may have been avoided or prevented had circumstances leading up to the accident been recognized, and acted upon, prior to its...

injury or death. Bad practice in floor cleaning is itself a major cause of accidents.
To beautify the floor.
To remove stain
Stain
A stain is a discoloration that can be clearly distinguished from the surface, material, or medium it is found upon. Stains are caused by the chemical or physical interaction of two dissimilar materials...

s, dirt, litter
Litter
Litter consists of waste products such as containers, papers, wrappers or faeces which have been disposed of without consent. Litter can also be used as a verb...

and obstructions.
To remove grit and sand
Sand
Sand is a naturally occurring granular material composed of finely divided rock and mineral particles.The composition of sand is highly variable, depending on the local rock sources and conditions, but the most common constituent of sand in inland continental settings and non-tropical coastal...

which scratch and wear down the surface.
To remove allergen
Allergen
An allergen is any substance that can cause an allergy. In technical terms, an allergen is a non-parasitic antigen capable of stimulating a type-I hypersensitivity reaction in atopic individuals....

s, in particular dust
Dust
Dust consists of particles in the atmosphere that arise from various sources such as soil dust lifted up by wind , volcanic eruptions, and pollution...

.
To prevent wear to the surface e.g. by using a floor wax
Wax
thumb|right|[[Cetyl palmitate]], a typical wax ester.Wax refers to a class of chemical compounds that are plastic near ambient temperatures. Characteristically, they melt above 45 °C to give a low viscosity liquid. Waxes are insoluble in water but soluble in organic, nonpolar solvents...

or protective sealant
Sealant
A sealant may be viscous material that has little or no flow characteristics and stay where they are applied or thin and runny so as to allow it to penetrate the substrate by means of capillary reaction...

.
To make the environment sanitary
Hygiene
Hygiene refers to the set of practices perceived by a community to be associated with the preservation of health and healthy living. While in modern medical sciences there is a set of standards of hygiene recommended for different situations, what is considered hygienic or not can vary between...

e.g. in kitchen
Kitchen
A kitchen is a room or part of a room used for cooking and food preparation.In the West, a modern residential kitchen is typically equipped with a stove, a sink with hot and cold running water, a refrigerator and kitchen cabinets arranged according to a modular design. Many households have a...

s.
To maintain an optimum traction
Friction
Friction is the force resisting the relative motion of solid surfaces, fluid layers, and/or material elements sliding against each other. There are several types of friction:...

e.g. for dance floors
Performance surface
A performance surface is a flooring suitable for dance or sport. Performance surfaces are normally laid on top of, or are part of, a sprung floor to produce a complete dance floor or sports floor....

.

Methods of floor cleaning

The treatment needed for different types of floors is very different. For safety it is most important to ensure the floor is not left even slightly wet after cleaning or mopping up.

Sawdust is used on some floors to absorb any liquids that fall rather than trying to prevent them being spilt. The sawdust is swept up and replaced each day. This was common in the past in pubs and is still used in some butcher

Butcher

A butcher is a person who may slaughter animals, dress their flesh, sell their meat or any combination of these three tasks. They may prepare standard cuts of meat, poultry, fish and shellfish for sale in retail or wholesale food establishments...

s and fishmonger

Fishmonger

A fishmonger is someone who sells fish and seafood...

s.

It used to be common to use tea leaves to collect dirt from carpets and remove odours. Nowadays it is sill quite common to use diatomaceous earth

Diatomaceous earth

Diatomaceous earth also known as diatomite or kieselgur/kieselguhr, is a naturally occurring, soft, siliceous sedimentary rock that is easily crumbled into a fine white to off-white powder. It has a particle size ranging from less than 1 micrometre to more than 1 millimetre, but typically 10 to...

, or in fact any cat litter type material, to remove infestations from floors.

There are also a wide variety of floor cleaning machines available today such as floor buffers,automatic floor scrubbers and sweepers, and carpet

Carpet

A carpet is a textile floor covering consisting of an upper layer of "pile" attached to a backing. The pile is generally either made from wool or a manmade fibre such as polypropylene,nylon or polyester and usually consists of twisted tufts which are often heat-treated to maintain their...

extractors that can deep clean almost any type of hard floor or carpeted flooring surface in much less time than it would take using a traditional cleaning method.

Wood flooring

Wood flooring should be treated completely differently depending on whether it waxed or oiled, or whether it has a polyurethane coating. It is important to determine the type of finish of a wood floor and always treat it the appropriate way, for instance it is difficult to clear wood floor wax from a polyurethane floor.

Reducing the need for cleaning

Good well-maintained entrance matting

Mat

A mat is a generic term for a piece of fabric or flat material, generally placed on a floor or other flat surface, and serving a range of purposes including:* providing a regular or flat surface, such as a mousepad....

can dramatically reduce the need for cleaning. For public and office buildings about 80 to 90% of the dirt is tracked in from outside. Installing a total of 15 feet of matting consisting of both indoor and outdoor sections will remove about 80% of this. Thus about two-thirds of the dirt can be removed at the entrance. BS 7953 'Entrance flooring systems. Selection, installation and maintenance' has standards relating to barrier matting.

Reasons for cleaning floors

Methods of floor cleaning

Wood flooring

Reducing the need for cleaning

See also