This Slate tiled kitchen floor at a house in Royal Leamington Spa needed a full clean and seal plus some of the tiles were reclaimed having been used originally outside and as well as loosing colour were suffering from salt damage.
Cleaning Slate Tiled Flooring
To remove the sealer, clean the floor and tackle the salt damage the floor we used a 50/50 mix of Tile Doctor Pro-Clean and Nanotech Ultra-Clean worked into the floor with a buffing machine fitted with a black scrubbing pad. This product combination creates a powerful cleaning solution with Nano sized abrasive cleaning particles that’s ideal for cleaning difficult floors. It’s also very good for cleaning up grout however I find that’s best tackled manually using a stiff brush.
The next step was to remove the salts from the floor, this problem is more commonly known as efflorescence and results in white salt deposits being left on the surface of the tile, the only way to remove it is with an strong acidic cleaner such as Tile Doctor Grout Clean-Up, you do need to be careful not to allow it to dwell too long as it can damage the tile surface.
Last step in the process was to remove the soiled cleaning solution with wet vacuum and then wash down the whole floor with clean water in order to neutralise it before sealing. We have invested in a powerful indoor spinner tool for this purpose which is a fantastic product that applies and removes water under high pressure. We then left the floor so it could dry overnight.
Sealing and Colouring Slate Tiles
The reclaimed slate tiles were a different colour to the rest and the owner was keen to have them dyed to make the floor uniform, fortunately we access to an industrial stone colouring product and were able to apply this to darken the stone.
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The next step was to seal the slate floor and for this we applied a coat of Tile Doctor Colour Grow which seals and deepens the black colour of the Slate, the floor was left to dry fully and then we applied a further three coats of Tile Doctor Seal and Go to bring out more colour and add a low sheen.
