Carpet and hard floors: what each needs, and how often

Floor care is usually the largest periodic item on a commercial cleaning quote and the one people understand least. It is worth ten minutes, because it is also the item where the difference between doing it and not doing it is measured in years of floor life rather than in how the place looks on Friday.

Vacuuming is not extraction, and one does not replace the other

Vacuuming removes loose soil sitting in and on the pile. Extraction — hot water pushed into the carpet and pulled back out — removes what has bonded to the fibres and what has worked its way to the base of the pile, which is where the damage happens.

The reason this matters is mechanical rather than cosmetic. Grit at the base of a carpet acts like sandpaper every time somebody walks on it, cutting the fibres. A carpet that is vacuumed well and never extracted does not look dirty for a long time and then suddenly does, because by the time soil is visible at the top of the pile there is a great deal more of it underneath.

Vacuuming frequently is the single highest-value thing you can do for a carpet. It is not a substitute for extraction, and extraction is not a substitute for it.

Carpet: the shape of a sensible programme

• Vacuum traffic lanes and entrances often — daily in a busy office, and more often than the rest of the floor.
• Deal with spots when they happen, not on a schedule. Most stains are removable for about a day and permanent after a week.
• Extract on a cycle, with entrances and main routes done more often than meeting rooms and perimeters that nobody walks on.
• Expect the cycle to be shorter for light-coloured carpet, ground floors, and anywhere people arrive from outside.

A common arrangement is annual extraction across the floor with traffic lanes done more frequently than that, but the interval should follow the traffic rather than the date. If a lane looks tired six months in, the cycle is too long for that lane, not for the building.

Hard floors: it depends entirely on the finish

There is no general answer for hard floors, because the term covers materials that want incompatible treatment. What matters is not what the floor is made of so much as what is on top of it.

• A floor with an applied finish or sealer — much vinyl, VCT, some wood — is protected by that coating, and the coating is what you are maintaining. Damp mopping and periodic scrubbing keep it; eventually it needs stripping back and resealing.
• A floor that is sealed at manufacture, such as most LVT and laminate, generally does not want stripping and resealing at all, and doing it can ruin the surface.
• Polished concrete and natural stone want their own regimes and, in the case of stone, products at the right pH — acidic cleaners will etch some stone permanently.

Before agreeing to any hard floor programme, establish what the floor actually is and whether it carries a finish. A company that starts by asking that question is telling you something reassuring. One that quotes a strip and reseal without asking is telling you something else.

Scrubbing and stripping are different jobs

A scrub cleans the finish. A strip removes it and a reseal puts a new one down. The second is slow, disruptive, needs the floor out of use while it cures, and is the expensive one on the quote.

Doing it too often wastes money and thins the substrate underneath. Leaving it too long means the finish wears through in traffic lanes and the floor itself starts taking the damage, at which point the cheap job is no longer available.

The cheapest floor maintenance there is

Entrance matting, and enough of it.

Most of what damages an interior floor arrives on the soles of shoes from outside, and matting takes it off before it gets in. To do anything useful it has to be long enough that a person takes several steps on it, which is considerably longer than the mat most buildings have by the door. It also has to be cleaned, or it becomes a soil reservoir that redistributes rather than captures.

It is unglamorous and it does more for a floor budget than any other single decision.

What to get priced

Ask for periodic floor work to be quoted explicitly and separately, even if it is not happening yet, and ask what triggers it: a fixed interval, or an inspection.

• Which areas are extracted or scrubbed, and on what cycle.
• Whether traffic lanes are on a shorter cycle than the rest.
• Whether stripping and resealing is included anywhere, and for which floors.
• What happens to the space while it is done, and whether that is out of hours.
• Who supplies and cleans the entrance matting.

If you are comparing two quotes and one folds floor care into the monthly rate while the other lists it separately, the monthly figures are not describing the same job.