Slate kitchen floor tiles deep cleaned and sealed in Harpenden Heretfordshire. As you can see below they where in a very grubby dirty state with allot of grease and built up tile sealing products etc.
Rotary floor machine chemical cleaning
Our first action was to use two different types of chemicals with a medium grade scouring pad to remove surface grime and dirt. After going over the floor two times and continuously wet vacuuming and rinsing allot of the dirt in the grout lines gets soft and comes up to.
Steam clean and detailed scrub to grout lines
However rotary floor machines only go so far and all grout lines need a detailed hand scrub and steam. We take this detailed hand cleaning opportunity to get any difficult spots that did not come clean with the floor machine.
Removing the difficult stuff with Wax Off solvent
Topical tile waxes that are available all over the place and are usually bought by homeowners and over applied can be very tricky to remove. This slate tiled floor had an excessive build up of these waxes on all the edges. These topical waxes are known as acrylic tile waxes and combine plastic and resin with waxes which make them very difficult to remove.
So in the pic you can see a well known solvent to remove these topical waxes called “Wax Off”. This product is very effective and usually my “go to ” product when I come to anything that is hard to remove from tiles.
Sealing and preserving slate tiles
Below you can see the slate tiles that are now perfectly clean and stripped of anything that is not supposed to be in them. They are quite flat and a medium to dark grey color. Slate gets allot of unsightly surface scratching that can be caused by just about everything. So to prevent these scratches and scuffs we need to now protect the tiles and consolidate the surface with an impregnating tile sealer. A good color enhancing oil based sealer really does the trick on this one!
Now all sealed and buffed below in the pic. Its important to apply tile sealer slowly and carefully patch by patch with slate as I have found it can have funny results if rushed. There have been times when I have had to go back and sort out funny tiles where the sealer dried awkwardly leaving marks, even after machine buffing.
