How to Make Old Gym Wood Floor Nice Again
A hardwood court is a big investment for any able-bodied facility. Similar whatever big investment, organizations want to do whatsoever they tin to take care of it. Simply when the people in charge of the courtroom are unfamiliar with proper basic care, they tend to finish up doing too much — or not plenty. "With gym floors, there's and then many misconceptions about what y'all're supposed to or not supposed to do because the floor is wood," says Bill Price Jr., national sport manger with Aurora, Colo.-based hardwood care specialist Bona. "The people who maintain floors have grown up with the notion that you can't put h2o on woods. For that reason, about gym floors get neglected. They don't go the proper maintenance because people are agape."
A minimum of a one time-daily dry mopping and tacking is recommended, but what does that hateful? Moreover, exercise the people taking care of the floors understand why they're doing what they're doing?
THE NITTY GRITTY
Gerry Harris, founder and president of Orange, Calif.-based Court Make clean, recommends a daily cleaning first thing in the morning. "The dust and dirt accept settled on the floor overnight," he explains. "The dirt is acting like sandpaper — the first person who walks on your floor every morning is basically scratching it."
This cleaning should be done regardless of how often a flooring is used, Harris adds. "It's a matter of the clay and dust that are in the air. You can go in a gym that hasn't been used at all and still clean it three times a twenty-four hours, and information technology'll exist filthy."
Especially in older buildings or those with poorly maintained HVAC systems, dust tin become a real outcome. "If I had to throw a made-upward number at yous, I would say xc pct of the problems related to slip are acquired by dust on the surface," says Price. "Y'all go into a gym and await up near the rafters, lighting, and fans and you lot can run across dust caked on — that's usually an indicator that there's a lot of dust in the facility, and yous take to do your best to try and stay alee of it."
Though reducing the corporeality of dust in a facility may be hard to practice, facilities tin accept steps to reduce the amount of dirt and debris tracked into the gym by users and spectators. Asking gym users not to wear street shoes onto the court is a start simply difficult to enforce. That is why well-nigh floor-intendance experts recommend walk-off mats.
"Walk-off mats are one of the nigh important things that a gym can provide to restrict some of that grit from making it into the gym," says Price. Without proper care themselves, however, walk-off mats will do zip but create a built-upward supply of debris for users to track in. "Just considering you lot have them doesn't mean they're gratis and clear. They have to be vacuumed and maintained on a daily basis."
Mats should be located at facility entranceways as well as entrances to the gym, creating every bit many opportunities as possible to trap dirt before it gets anywhere nearly the hardwood. "The best matter that tin be done for a gym floor is keep information technology free of grit," says Toll. "It's the major obstacle for any gym floor. If they can go on the grit off, that will relieve so many headaches and and then much time to come wear."
CHEMICAL BALANCE
A daily dry mopping or sweeping will minimize loose grit and dirt, but removal of caked-on debris or stale-on residue requires a little more than effort. "Lightly saturate a towel or a microfiber fabric and push button it around the floor to get the clay off the floor," says Brent Sorbet, technical services coordinator at Dollar Bay, Mich.-based Horner Flooring, referring to the practice of tacking. "That's the poor human being's way of cleaning a floor, and that'southward how floors were cleaned for years before they came out with all of these devices."
There are a multifariousness of cleaning tools available to make the process go faster and more efficiently, but if whoever is cleaning the court doesn't empathize what they're doing, they tin end upward causing significant damage to a floor. The staples of janitorial closets — the mop and saucepan — aren't typically recommended for utilize on hardwood floors. Not only is it more time-consuming than other options, but over-mopping can cause water impairment to floors. "I've seen people let floors soak when they feel the floor is excessively muddy," says Sorbet. "That'south a no-no. The moisture and water become downwards in the cracks and can ruin the floor. It changes the whole moisture content and causes bigger issues."
Mopping also presents the risk of some other common court-cleaning mistake: cross-contamination. "Someone volition mop a hallway and then use that same mop in the gym," says Price, which volition more often than not leave the floor looking cloudy and unclean because of residual left backside. Using dirty h2o to try to clean a floor is in itself a poor determination, only the chemicals used to clean a school hallway also are non the aforementioned ones recommended to clean hardwood.
"The wrong cleaning product may make a flooring slick, hazy or sticky," says Sorbet, who recommends having a dedicated ready of cleaning tools and supplies for the courtroom. While a shiny floor is aesthetically pleasing, the existent issue is how a chemical affects the surface tension. "Y'all don't desire it so tight that you could twist something nor create a slip run a risk."
And then what should be used to clean the flooring? "All the unlike end companies accept their ain cleaners," says Harris. "Only basically, any floor cleaner will work on a floor; information technology's not dependent on the blazon of cease. Whatever neutral-pH floor cleaner will work. Fifty-fifty h2o will practise."
A well-maintained floor shouldn't need an arsenal of chemicals that claim to restore shine or forestall slip, nor does a court demand to scent citrusy-fresh. To avoid over-saturating, a floor cleaner should be applied either with a towel or cleaning organization such every bit Court Clean's, which involves an appliance pulled along the floor, allowing for full-courtroom coverage in a few minutes.
The almost controversial cleaning tool in the industry is the automated floor scrubber. "A lot of manufacturers — the Maple Flooring Manufacturers Association included — don't see eye to centre on the utilise of scrubbers," says Toll. "We say they tin can use it, with conditions: It has to be very well-maintained, have a adept vacuum, part properly. We await at information technology from the standpoint of the finish. It's not going to hurt the stop, just it may do something to the forest if information technology's not working properly."
The devices, when used correctly, tin shave meaning time off the cleaning process, and are commonly seen in larger facilities. "Marquette University has a 25,000-square-foot court," says Sorbet, whose official stance is confronting using flooring scrubbers. "Practise you think they tack that every day? They use floor scrubbers. There isn't one facility that has more than a 15,000- to thirty,000-square-pes gym doing it by paw. But it is not MFMA-approved."
Like a mop-and-bucket organisation, the concern is that improper application will damage the floor. If it'southward not working properly, operators run the take a chance of over-saturating an area of the floor or doing harm with scrubbing pads. For smaller facilities, the time-savings of a scrubber usually isn't worth the potential gamble. For trouble spots, the old way is withal the nearly reliable, says Sorbet. "I would only go in with a spray canteen or tin can of mineral spirits, walk a floor, scrape debris off or give information technology a spray to take film off."
A CLEANER COAT
Proper daily maintenance isn't but most keeping the court rubber for daily utilise, but also over the long term. "The longer a floor goes without maintenance, the more hard it becomes to get that floor back into practiced shape when information technology comes fourth dimension for a recoat," says Price. "If it's not well-maintained or there's a lot of scuffs, and if they can't get all of the imperfections off earlier they put on the next coat, so they're just trapping them in. The floor volition never really look fresh and make clean."
Most manufacturers recommend recoating a hardwood court on a yearly basis, though budgets might not allow for information technology. For facilities that don't practice a yearly recoating, it's even more than of import to continue up with the daily cleaning. "The principal affair removing the finish on the floor is clay," says Harris. "By keeping information technology clean, yous're preserving the finish, which thereby equates to dollars."
While proper care can delay how long a floor can go between coatings, it is non a replacement. Regular recoating is a necessary investment, and, like proper daily care, staves off more expensive piece of work. "Usually the near inexpensive thing that tin can be done on a floor is the recoat," says Price. "If a facility doesn't maintain the floor and it looks rough after eight years, the re-sand is going to be 4 to five times as expensive to get it in good shape again."
Facility owners should also understand that a proper care regimen keeps a floor safe for use and looking good, only scuffs and scratches on a flooring are inevitable. "We do a lot of piece of work with the NBA and NCAA," says Price. "Those floors are some of the most high-profile floors in the earth. They're also pampered to the point where not too many activities actually take identify on them. They're commonly put downwardly for a game, and then they option them upwardly and put them away. At that place'south so much more than that happens to a school flooring in terms of abuse and and then much more than maintenance that would be required to keep it up."
This article originally appeared in the May 2014 issue of Athletic Business organisation nether the headline, "Squeaky Clean."
Source: https://www.athleticbusiness.com/facilities/gym-fieldhouse/article/15145736/proper-cleaning-and-maintenance-for-hardwood-courts
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