Remove Salt Residue From Floors Fast!

Get Rid Of Salt Residue On Floors

Winter weather brings with it additional areas of concern for cleaning professionals. When snow and ice show up, there are additional cleaning steps that need to be added to your floor care routine. These different challenges are easy to overcome when you understand how to remove salt residue from floors.

Trust me, I understand what you are facing. Mopping the floor just seems to make things worse. Stickiness is the biggest frustration. It not only makes the floor look dirty, but it also causes it to get dirty faster than ever. You just want to throw down you mop and give up, right? Well, don’t do that. Below you will see that it is not as difficult once you understand what is going on. A few minor changes will make your life much easier when the snow flies and you need to remove salt residue from your floors.

Salt Neutralizer For Floors

The answer to cleaning salt residue is to use a floor floor neutralizer cleaner. Something so simple as salt, it is really a big problem for many custodians. Removing salt residue from floors is difficult because the soil on the floor has changed from regular dirt, to calcium chloride or salt. This means that the chemical used to clean the floor must change as well.

When salt is dissolved in water, it becomes sticky and just seems to smear around as you mop or scrub the floor. Because the floor cleaning you normal use is probably a neutral cleaner, it simply will not break down the calcium chloride in the ice melting products that are tracked in. This is why it is so important to try and keep as much of the salt outside as possible. I suggest to use extra matting and remove the salt as soon as the sidewalks are clear. This will lessen the amount of salt that you have to deal with.

Most floor cleaning chemicals or neutral cleaners are designed to remove typical dirt and grime.

When a substance as different as salt or calcium chloride becomes the main soil overnight, it requires a different approach.

Why Salt Residue Is So Hard To Remove?

The makeup of most ice melting products is based around calcium chloride or salt, because of its effective melting properties and because it is relatively cheap. The problem when it comes to floor care is that it has a high pH, just like floor stripper.

To remove salt residue, it has to be neutralized, changing the pH to neutral or 7. When it is not neutralized, it dissolves in the mop water. This makes it smear on the floor and becomes a sticky mess when it dries. This stickiness has 2 causes:

• The water used to clean the floor has a high concentration salt that has been picked up while cleaning. Obviously when you mop the floor it is still wet. The salt is suspended in that moisture that is left on the floor. As the water evaporates, the salt in the water is left behind, leaving a salty film on the floor.
• The second reason is that the alkaline nature of the salt has begun to dissolve the floor finish. Chemicals used to strip the floor are highly alkaline. This is what breaks down the floor finish and allows you to strip the floor. While salt is not as high in alkalinity as floor stripper, it can, over time begin to dissolve the floor finish. Anyone who has stripped a floor knows that when floor finish starts to dissolve and dries, it gets sticky. The same could be happening via the salt. Just slower.

Either way, the stickiness is causing your floors to attract dirt. And we know that a sticky floor is very difficult if not impossible to clean.

If this dirt remains on the floor too long, it will cause un-repairable damage to the floor and result in a full strip and re-coat to correct.

Let’s not allow it to get that far. Below, you will see the steps to eliminate salt residue from your tile floors and maintain them even with heavy traffic during a show storm.

Why Floor Neutralizer Removes Salt Residue

Now that you know the importance of removing the salt residue lets look at why neutralizers are so much more effective for removing salt than neutral floor cleaners.

As stated above, the alkaline salt residue needs to be neutralized before it will release easily from the floor.

The best way to do this is to use an acidic chemical. No, not the big barrel of green goo you see in movies. Something a little more mild and a lot safer.

Floor neutralizers are very useful cleaning agents. They are commonly used in several cleaning processes, most notably in carpet cleaning. Most cleaning chemicals will fall slightly on the alkaline side of the pH scale as depicted in the chart. The low alkalinity breaks down greasy soils and releases them from strands of carpet.

The side effect of this is the inherent stickiness of alkaline chemicals. Too often, cleaning people will use too much chemical in an attempt to do a better job or get it done faster. With cleaning chemicals, this is not the case. The excess sticky chemical is left behind and can build up over time. Stickiness equals dirty. So a neutralizer is used the dissolve the chemical residue and remove the sticky soils.

This also does the job to remove the alkalinity of salt residue. Just make sure to follow the directions for cleaning floors rather than cleaning carpets. The dilution ratios are often different and obviously so are the procedures.

Where To Get Floor Neutralizer?

There are many brands of acidic pH neutralizer cleaning chemicals out there. Here’s an Amazon affiliate link to the floor neutralizer I have had good luck with. The dissolving packets make it easy to quickly change to winter floor care mode and maintain your floors without a change in the procedures. This neutralizer can even be used in an automatic floor scrubber. Just make sure you adjust the number of packets for the volume of your solution tank.

I prefer to use actual neutralizer chemicals in commercial cleaning due to the liability of using other, home-made methods. Ensuring you have the proper documentation (Safety Data Sheets) is essential for any business and these types of professional cleaning products provide the health and safety documentation that is essential for everyone to protect themselves.