By choosing the right flooring material, you can eliminate maintenance for your commercial kitchen floor.
A commercial kitchen floor must withstand heavy traffic, extreme temperatures, spills (grease, food debris), leaks, dropped knives or heavy equipment, and overall constant use. Floors that undergo this type of abuse are typically subject to annual maintenance. With many obstacles, owners and managers must use the appropriate flooring material to eliminate the need for maintenance.
Managers and owners alike dread these types of projects and when searching for the right product and installation process, they should consider the hassle associated with installation and required upkeep.
Many types of flooring have seams, ridges, or joints that require resealing or grout repair. Experienced tile experts recommend re-grouting or resealing at least once a year or whenever discoloration begins. When grout turns brown or black, the sealant has failed meaning dirt, bacteria, mold, or grease is penetrating the grout and creating an opportunity for unsafe and unhygienic conditions. There is not enough cleaning in the world that will make them safe and hygienic. Failed floors harbor bacteria, grease, and dirt that allows for mold, mildew, and foul smells to take over. A 2,000 sq.ft.
Quarry tile kitchen floor can require around $30,000 in maintenance and repairs during its lifetime. Furthermore, it will take at least a day every year meaning a loss of revenue.
This also applies to sheet goods that require resealing of seams and joints when failure occurs. Although these types of flooring have less seams, when they fail they create a dire need for timely and costly maintenance. These images show failure that was patched creating multiple additional seams that failed again over time. Eventually, water leaked underneath the floor and damaged the subfloor which created a multitude of other issues.
Additionally, broadcast flooring systems are made up of multiple layers of base/top coats and stone aggregate that will wear one layer at a time requiring resealing especially in high-traffic areas. This type of maintenance shuts the entire kitchen down for several days due to the stages which require curing in between layers.
By researching and installing high performance flooring systems, you can eliminate longstanding maintenance costs and the hassle of annual floor preservation initiatives. When considering how to reduce long-term ownership costs, increased health and safety, and reduced downtime, consider using a flooring material that requires no routine maintenance and is hassle-free during installation and daily cleaning.
Some hand-troweled epoxy and quartz aggregate mixtures can be installed in one application, overnight and be read to use the next morning because of 6-8 hour cure times. They require no periodic maintenance due to its seamless, watertight, non-porous, and slip-resistant nature. There are no seams, ridges or joints that require grout repair or resealing and installation can occur directly over your failing existing floor.
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