Grout haze removal after a newly installed tile floor is necessary now more than ever. The days of 12″ x 12″ floor tiles is gone and is not coming back any time soon.
These days tiles are made to look like grouted wood floors. The tiles are installed in an offset to look like a wood floor installation. Kiln fired tiles are slightly bowed and they have to be installed so the ends aren’t lined up with the high edges.
The customer typically wants a dark colored grout. This grout haze has to be cleaned off carefully. Too much water in the cleaning can cause the color in the grout to wash out. This can lead to an uneven grout color.
Complicating the tile install is the fact that the tile is sometimes installed too early in the construction process and a variety of tradesman are still tracking in grease, adhesives, paint, sod dirt, tar and caulk. These substances combined wit the grout haze are difficult if not impossible to clean even on your hands and knees with a scrub pad.
Fabric and Tile Masters is often called on by homeowners to clean newly installed tile. We remove everything. The attached video shows a floor that has extensive grout haze as well as many paint spots that needed to be removed with a razor blade. This floor would have never looked right and the result would be dirty feet or white socks.
Fabric and Tile Masters shows in this video the superior way our company returns the tiles to a condition that is identical to the tiles you saw on the showroom floor just like the one I laid on the floor in the pictures. The process is simple but would be hard to duplicate for most restoration companies because they lack our tools.
- we start with a floor machine that weighs 160 lbs. we meter through an alkaline cleaner for grout haze removal that breaks down a variety of soils like grease, tar and adhesives.
- we let this solution dwell on the floor for 15 – 20 minutes.
- after the solution has had time to work we remove all of it with our powerful truck mounted machine. we have a 225,000 burner that produces excellent heat.
In the top photo you can see the cleaned area near the sliding glass door. In the bottom photo we show an out of the box tile. This is what we are able to achieve with our cleaning process. You can click on these photos to make them larger.
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