When cleaning a hard floor, there are lots of options in terms of how you can go about cleaning them.  Whether you want to strip, clean, buff or polish a floor a floor pad is the way to go about it - especially on wooden floors. 

High traffic areas require more attention and need a more hard working floor solution, but finding the right solution can be really challenging for many of our customers. 

However, we are here to give advice and support and have a great deal of knowledge and expertise here at Astral Hygiene so if you do have any questions please just give us a ring! Every floor has it's own set of factors and needs specific instructions and specific care.

To get the best results you do need the right floor pad, and the right cleaning product but with the right combination of equipment to achieve the best results. 

It's fitting all of this together and making the right selections that make caring for your floor much easier. 

From stripping existing floors to spot cleaning, it is vital to consider the type of floor (marble/wood) you are working with to achieve optimum results. 

Floor pads can be used for both Scrubber Dryers, and we do sell an awful lot of Numatic Scrubber Dryers here because they are very compact, provide a good level of coverage and the customer service we receive from them is second to none. Usually unless you are trying to scrub a floor that is concrete or another type of hard surface you would use a high speed single disk machine such as a Hurricane which can be used for buffing, stripping, polishing and scrubbing. 

There are a range of machines which can be used for a range of purposes, and this blog is not intended to explain that in detail, but to demonstrate you would use the Numatic Scrubber Dryer for places where you would like to introduce water to the surface, perhaps with a little chemical which will break down the dirt without creating too much foam,  such as Low Foam Heavy, so you can use the floor pad (probably a red floor pad - but we're coming to that!) to agitate the dirt from the floor without actually damaging the floor at a speed of 150rpm. With a scrubber dryer like this one, you begin pushing your machine along the floor, water/chemical is the automatically introduced, is agitated by your red floor pad lifting the dirt and soil, and is then channeled by the squeegees towards the extractor at the back of the machine - leaving your floor completely clean and dry as you walk behind it! These machines have to be seen in action, so if you'd like a free demonstration, e-mail us at sales@astralhygiene.co.uk and we'll send out an engineer to demonstrate the machine for you. 

If you are looking for a machine that will strip your floor polish off and buff your floors to a high shine, then something like the Hurricane HFT15306 would better suit your requirements.  These single disc machines operate at a high rpm, which means they will buff to a very high shine. 

So in essence, your floor pad needs to be the correct colour which will dictate the texture as each floor pad is engineered for a particular task. Simply guessing which floor pad you need is not the most scientific of methods, and you are unlikely to get the desired result.  

Getting a good quality floor pad is important, as you need to make sure your floor pad is uniform in shape and thickness, but will also stand up to the job you need it to do. Getting a good quality floor pad will mean that it will strip your floor much more quickly than other pads.

As a rule of thumb, the darker the colour, the more the pad will agitate, so when using a dark pad (black, brown) you need to keep a close watch on how your pad is performing to make sure you aren't damaging the floor. Day dreamers beware, you need to focus on the task in hand! So lets break down what each of the colours do: 

Black Floor Pad

A very dense and heavy duty pad, great for cleaning uneven surfaces and in particular stone floors. This will agite the dirt out of the floor and will begin to lift your floor polish. 

Brown Floor Pad

A good solid floor pad, strong and mighty enough to remove 2-4 coats of polish, but won't damage your floor when it meets the floor itself.  For excessive layers of floor polish, use a black pad to take off the first few layers of polish and then downgrade to the brown to finish the job. 

Green Floor Pad 

The green pad is a middle of the road pad, a mildly aggressive pad, which will prepare your hard wood floors for re-coating and stripping floors of some polish to allow a quick re-application of polish with a less aggressive pad. The green pad can also be used for daily wet scrubbing of unprotected (non varnished/waxed) floors with a scrubber dryer.

Blue Floor Pad

Your blue floor pad is great for regular wet maintenance of unprotected floors, but is also used on a single disc machine for medium soiled floors and dry stripping of soft floors.  This pad will easily remove soil, heel marks and ground in dirt. 

Red Floor Pad

One of the most commonly used pads in a wet scrubber drier, this pad will bring up unprotected floors surprisingly well due to the speed the ad moves over the floor. This pad will also produce a soft shine to a varnished polished/waxed floor. 

White Floor Pad

The last pad in the arsenal is the white floor pad. Great for everyday maintenance, passed over any floor this one will burnish it up to its former shine, but also superb for putting down another coat of polish prior to those special occasions. 

To keep your pads in tip top condition, follow the three golden rules! 

1. Remove the pad you have been using from machine after each use.
2. Rinse under tap water or spray water, or keep pad soaked in diluted stripping solution, to dissolve caked on finish. Do not let dirty pads dry before washing.
3. Rinse and hang up for drying.

If you'd like any more information on floor machines and floor pads, give our offices a call.... because if we don't know the answer, we'll find out for you!

This blog was written by Anna Armstrong, Director of Sales and Operations at Astral. Please get in touch if there are any particular topics you would like us to talk about on the blog!