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REGULAR SEAL OF APPROVAL


As the summer draws to a close, schools across the country are undergoing those all- important last minute maintenance checks before the kids return. With that in mind, Matt Baines, of Premiere Products, offers some advice to caretakers who may be thinking of retreating and sealing the hardwood floors of their school halls.


May I begin this month’s editorial by wishing the Tomorrow’s Cleaning readership a hearty early autumnal greeting! As I sit at my desk in our new offices I can say that the sun is shining, the leaves on the trees are just starting to turn golden, there is an ever so slight nip in the air and all is well in the world!


Now there may be some amongst you who are wondering why it is that I am sounding so chipper at the end of summer with the prospect of winter and all that it entails (arriving at work in the dark, leaving work in the dark, de-icing the car, etc) looming on the horizon? Well the simple fact of the matter is that the dawning of September also signifies the end of the school summer holidays and with it an end to the childcare nightmare that working parents (myself included) experience. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge my son or indeed his teachers, their summer break and if I could afford to take the whole six-week period off and spend every day with my son, it would be great, but clearly that’s impractical for the vast majority of us.


On a somewhat related note, Premiere has a very strong customer base in local authority education and this, combined with the fact that the school summer holidays is traditionally the time of year when more intensive and technical processes (such as hard floor rejuvenation and retreatment) are undertaken means that our technical advice telephone line can often be red hot in the week to 10 days before the kids go back.


I’ll never forget speaking to one highly distressed caretaker who had applied a spirit based floor seal to his school hall floor and was calling to enquire why it might still be tacky if not wet in certain places, long after the stated drying time had been and gone. During the course of our conversation I was able to glean that he had been waiting for the seal to dry and cure for almost


26 | Tomorrow’s Cleaning September 2015 twitter.com/TomoCleaning


four weeks by the time we spoke and was understandably panicky given that he had a little under a week before the children and staff returned.


It also transpired that this was the first time he had ever used a seal on this particular floor, having previously and for many years, applied a spirit based wax. Unfortunately spirit based waxes and floor seals (both spirit and water based) are incompatible with one another and the problems being encountered on this occasion were a direct result of this. Regrettable though it may have been, our only recourse was to advise that he purchase a quantity of paint stripper which would soften the seal to a point that it could be scraped away from the floor by hand and once complete, retreat with a spirit based wax – a monumental operation to be accomplished in such a short period of time!


It has long been our advice where the treatment of wooden flooring is concerned, to top dress floor seals with an emulsion floor polish. While we understand that other manufacturers will suggest that the polymer present in floor polishes “contaminates” the seal film, meaning that the floor will require lightly sanding prior to any future application of floor seal, our counter argument is that the polish in fact protects the floor by acting


as a sacrificial wear layer. In fact our research has proven that, provided the floor polish is rejuvenated and refreshed before it completely wears away, it will extend the life of the floor seal indefinitely. Given that floor seals are typically more expensive than floor polishes and the process of applying them is more labour intensive and time consuming, we feel that our advice represents the best option for our customers.


That’s not to say however, that our recommendation doesn’t on occasion lead to other difficulties. For example, another common end of summer holiday call we receive is that where the customer has applied an emulsion polish on top of their recently applied floor seal and the polish has rejected, drying white and powdery across the entire floor surface. This only happens where spirit based floor seals are concerned and is caused by the fact that this type of seal (particularly oleo resinous seals) secretes an oily residue during the curing process which settles across the surface of the seal film. It simply requires removing by mopping the floor with a dilution of neutral detergent prior to top dressing with polish. Failure to do this will cause widespread rejection of the polish across the floor in question as I have just detailed.


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