What Are the Black Marks on Our Vinyl Floor?
By Tommy Bachus · Director of Operations Pinellas Park, Fla. — 2 min read
Those marks are in the floor finish, not the tile. Black marking that comes back within days is telling you something specific about that finish.
They are heel marks, and they are a finish problem
Rubber soles transfer onto a floor under pressure and heat. On a floor with a properly built, properly hardened finish, that transfer sits on the surface and comes off with routine cleaning. On a floor without one, it embeds, and no amount of mopping brings it back.
Rapid black marking is a symptom of the coating rather than the traffic, so the thing to look at is why the floor marks so easily.
The chemistry that causes it
Armstrong Flooring's own commercial maintenance guidance lists the causes of rapid black marking plainly: little or no protective polish on the floor, a polish or cleaner with too high a pH, a cleaner too aggressive for the finish, or a floor polish that is simply too soft for the traffic it is carrying.
The same guidance attributes streaking to related causes: too much or too little polish in a coat, a dirty mop used to apply it, inadequate drying time between coats, and alkaline residue left on the floor.
And then there is the mop
String mops hold a great deal of water and solution, and a floor left over-wet dries with a film on it. Using more chemical makes it worse. Excess detergent leaves a residue that dulls the finish, attracts soil, and gets the floor dirty faster than it was before.
A floor that is sticky underfoot after cleaning is almost always being given too much product and too little rinse.
The fix is a program, not a product
Nothing in a bottle solves this. What solves it is a maintenance cycle sized to the traffic the floor actually carries.
- Correct dilution, measured rather than judged, and a clean mop or a flat-mop system.
- Enough coats of finish to have something to protect, applied thin and allowed to dry between them.
- Burnishing on a schedule, which hardens the finish and is what makes a floor resist marking rather than just look glossy.
- A strip and recoat when the finish is spent. Until that happens, every other step is maintaining a coating that is no longer there.