We maintain a daycare facility that has Nora Floors. They are a floor that looks great when installed and has a slightly soft surface that is easy on your joints when you walk on it all day. Its also nice for kids who fall down all day. The maintenance on these floors is slightly different than a traditional tile floor that is waxed and buffed. We mop the floors with a neutral floor cleaned that has disinfectant in it. It is slightly harder to mop due to its soft surface “grabbing” the mop. You will need to put a little more effort in to pulling your mop around. To make up for this we use a small auto scrubber with a red 3m pad for all the open areas. Then hand mop the places we can go to.
Last night we had to bring one of the class rooms back from some abuse it received from a bunch of preschoolers. The floor had paint stains all over the place for crafting projects that have happened. Initially we tried to scrape the high spots off and use some goof off to get the parts that had soaked in. This method did remove the paint but left the stains and damaged the surface of the floor. Our next attempt was just to do what the manufacture recommended and what we should have done from the start).
The product needed is Nora pads. We started with pad #3, the most aggressive one. The #3 pad goes on a low-speed swing machine, use water with a little but of neutral cleaner. After that we worked down the system with #2, #1, and #0 on a high-speed buffer and a little but of clean water to lubricate. The floor ended up looking like new. All the stains came out and the floor looks like new.
Lesson learned (again), stick with what the manufacture recommends. It usually works out. My last note on this project is that the Nora pads are annoyingly expensive. However, they seem to last a long time if you take care of them. We don’t leave them in the building to get lost and abused in a janitor’s closet. We take them back to our warehouse and clean them up with a low powered pressure washer, then dry them and store them flat on a shelf.