OT: Electric hard floor cleaner for tile and grout?

Pour bleach on the floor, undiluted. It does much of the work for you. Dont let it get walked onto nonbleachable carpets.

NT

I have seen stiff scrubber disks, and your scrubber looks like a weakling. But I don't know if the stain on your grout is a mechanical problem. I've used high pressure washer on. In the past, hydrochloric acid was used. It is safer than bleach, which is essentially lye (a strong base.) HCl won't eat through fibers, bleach will. HCl is basically non-toxic (it's stomach acid), bleach eats your skin. (That's why your skin feels slippery when you get bleach on it - you are dissolving.)

Hydrochloric may not eat your carpets but it WILL dissolve your grout.

And meat (your skin). Its in the stomach for a purpose.

Chloride ion and lime/silicate cement systems don't mix very well, though.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That's quite brutal on heavy furniture that can't easily be moved. Link our Hammond organ. Also, we don't like chemicals much.

Things is, with a hand scrubber you can get them super clean, looking like new. But it causes knee and wrist pains. All we'd need is a machine with bristles rotating in the correct direction. Maybe I'll modify a carpet cleaner.

It's more of a canine problem :-)

Two Labradors who get minor dirt under their paws when outside and then carry it onto the tile floor over time. They also like to lay on the tile in summer because they are cool and big dogs tend to drool a little.

Since this is indoors and walked on with bare paws by the dogs we don't want to use harsh chemicals. The pressure washer is kind of out as well indoors.

You might want to do that once more, and then put sealer on it.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

We did put sealer on it in the beginning and that hardly helped at all, so we stopped doing it. Probably this is because of the dogs. There are companies that somehow epoxy it up and charge an arm and a leg for this service. My experience with "miracle cures" has been largely nonenthusing in the first half of my life.

Why is it that nobody makes tile floor cleaners where the brushes rotate in the correct direction for efficient grout cleaning? The closes solution I found is this:

That would speed up the chore a lot but on roughly 1000sqft of tile you'd still be on the knees for too long.

My preferred solution would be to give the dogs away, but then I'm Not A Dog Person.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

"Life begins when the kids leave home and the dog dies."--Erma Bombeck

Nooo, never. We love dogs. They are also not just pets but therapy dogs (for others) and do regular nursing home visits with us. Then we are puppy sitters for Guide Dogs and so far the top in our house was seven dog and five humans.

We'd get another dog right away. Either from Guide Dogs again or from a shelter.

Your grout and tile are cleanable by area methods, or by spot methods. If there's a stain, look for an appropriate chemical solution (oxalic acid, chlorine bleach, hydrogen peroxide) and spot-clean. Otherwise, the usual solution is to put down waxed sawdust, buff it into the floor with your usual scrubber, then sweep up the loose bits (it's reusable).

It causes some buildup, of course (a kind of patina) so you should expect the floor to take on an antiqued look.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

That's what my wife absolutely positively does not want. There ought to be a machine that is able to do what we do by hand right now: Apply cleaning liquid, scrub, mop it up. It's really simple, it's just that hard floor cleaners are designed wrong in their rotating brushes.

If they rotated the other way, you'd have terrified housewives being chased across the floor by runaway machines. Two counter-rotating brushes on vertical axes are a lot easier for unskilled users to cope with.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

They are use to it already from carpet deep-cleaning machines. The powerful ones will try pulling away from your hand. Also, one could have two counter-rotating shafts to mitigate.

My impression is that this industry is not very inventive to begin with. They should talk to people actually doing the chores or, better yet, do it themselves for a few hours.

I think they are mostly concerned about how it will look in an infomercial ;)

I'm sure you can get stuff that really works but it'll be pro and at a size and price that it might be better to get a maid ;)

Tried steam?

-Lasse

The big commercial machines aren't that much better and we do not want to use harsh chemicals, in part because of our animals.

Yes. It cleans but not nearly as good as scrubbing. And of course it will not clean the grout.

Another idea is get a wire wheel on an electric drill and use that.

Here is a link to usage HCl for cleaning grout.

HCl was used for centuries to clean stone work. I think they did not leave it on and used dilute.