What's floor heavy-duty stripping 

Floor stripping usually indicates your floor meets really hard stains, scratches or old coatings, which is more heavy-duty than deep cleaning works. Every year, in most hospitals-healthcare or schools-education, they need to remove the old PU or other protective coatings and put on new coating layers. As usual, it will happen on resilient floors, we also call them coated floors, for example, the Linoleum, PVC, VCT, LVT, and epoxy resin floor, need to put on coatings to protect the people using them. If you want to learn more about resilient floors, welcome to read our blog "how to clean and maintain your resilient floor".

But some hard floors like polished concrete, terrazzo floor or stone floors, they also impregnate floor coatings to give the floor a wet-finish gloss look. When you need to renew the floor, the top action should be stripping them out. 

What kind of machine do you need

The popular floor care machines for floor stripping should be the heavy-duty floor buffer machine and the square orbital/oscillating machine. For the floor buffer/polisher machine, you need the extra weights to increase the pressure, with a low-speed rotation like 150-300 RPM, it can quickly remove the old coating layers from the floor. In TVX, you can choose TF1517P to help you complete the job.

For the orbital or oscillating machines, they have single round disc or square oscillating head, and the square can effectively clean the edge and corner zone, with extremely high oscillating speed per minute like 3000 times/min, it's easy to take off the old coatings or remove scratches. In TVX, our TF-1517S can help you quickly finish it.

                                                                         *The left side is after stripping and the right side is after re-coating

What kind of pads or chemicals do you need

Depends on what kind of machine you're using, if you're using a heavy-duty single disc machine, probably you need floor stripper chemicals to work the black floor pads or some special floor stripper pad like 3M SPP. Now you can also try diamond floor pads, if the coating layer is not thick, you can use diamond pads of around 200 grits and in this case, you can save costs of chemicals and use water only, we have a blog to introduce you how to choose the right floor cleaning pads, please learn the blog "One blog to know how to choose the right floor pads, brushes or squeegees".

For square floor orbital machine, the best option is diamond floor pads with water only, no floor stripper chemicals are needed. And for operation, the orbital machine is easy to operate so we also recommend this solution.

Operation Advice

1. If you use floor stripper chemicals, be careful to absorb the sewage quickly after you remove the old coatings, especially if you do it in the daytime, the sunshine will act with old coating layers since they're also chemical stuffings and will react with sunshine. If the sewage stays on floor for a long time, it may leave yellow spot marks on the floor, which is hard to remove.

2. Protect the clean zones out of the working areas. Please isolate the working areas from other areas since the sewage will pollute other floors and it will react, too. When you re-coat the floor, do it the same way. Set the signs to remind people to be careful of that.

3. Remember to use our vacuum cleaner machine. TVX also provides V70E for both wet and dry use. You can use it to absorb the sewage.

4. Wear personal protective equipment, working gloves and masks are necessary. Due to the smell and risk of chemicals, we suggest you prepare these protective equipment in advance.

If you have further more questions on floor stripping, welcome to contact us for a free solution.