Written by Silver Lining Floor Care

Basics of Cleaning Everything

Basics of Cleaning

  • Chemicals
  • Heat
  • Agitation
  • Time

CHAT – these are the 4 basics when it comes to cleaning everything. Whether it is dishes, wood floor, or your skin. It is all about balance, like everything in life.

Chemical

At Silver Lining Floor Care we try to stay as eco-friendly as possible, following ‘Zero Waste’ idea, we try to minimise on chemical input. Chemicals have no benefits when it comes to health, and our ultimate goal is to protect your health and those you love. At the same time, we try to do as much thorough cleaning as possible when it comes to your wood floors, stone floors, porcelain, carpet, rugs or any 0ther floor.  This will directly benefit your health. That is why we use….

Heat

As we minimise our chemical input we increase on the heat for water used for cleaning to allow better penetration. With higher temperature water tension changes which allow water to penetrate surfaces that are being cleaned. To achieve this while cleaning your carpets, we have a truck-mounted machine to increase the heat of our water to maximum instead depending on your water tap. Depending on the fibre we will make sure it is safe to use. Water is the most common solvent and is actually very powerful, yet many people forgot about it and add sometimes unnecessary chemicals.

Time

Since our chemical input is low, our heat is high, how about time? Instead of working with strong chemistry, while decreasing its power, we shall just give it a bit more time. Time cure everything. If you are to wash your dirty frying pan, you often leave it in the sink overnight so it dissolves in most common solvent (water) mixed with a cleaning product. Dishwashing chemicals are usually very strong, sometimes too strong to safely use on wool carpets. Either we leave the pre-sprayed weak chemicals or we just dedicate more time for cleaning.

Agitation

This is a mechanical part of the job. It is a sponge when it comes to dishes or your skin. We use different types of brushes, pads for our rotary machine. We have carpet brush for agitating the pre-spray for carpet cleaning, diamond brushes at different grids when it comes to stone and hard floor to agitate the cleaning solution. For wood we use different grids of sanding paper to achieve the desired effect.

CHAT – basics of cleaning – summary

You could wash your oily, dirty frying pan with slowly running cold water but it would just take forever and probably wasted a lot of water. You could also use some chemicals, increase temperature, leave it to dwell in the warm water with some cleaning products and use the sponge to clean and rinse at the end. As I said at the beginning…. It is always about finding the right balance in these four. Very often a good chemical can be water. It is healthier and we may spend a bit more time during agitation and boost up the heat to achieve very same results as with high chemical input in order to save on time, often with less agitation. The ‘high chemical’ methods are not necessarily great for your health, your family’s health, for the technician’s health and for the health of our planet.

Can you put a price tag on your health? Probably not. Can you put a price tag on time? Probably yes. This may be one of the reasons why some cleaning firms might be more expensive than others. Some will use strong chemistry in order to save time.  We’d rather spend a bit more time and value the biggest treasure which is our health. Health is the new wealth. Price and value are very different aspects. It all depends on priorities.

The best way to minimise chemical use is good maintenance.

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