Spring is a busy time of year for many industries. As work at your warehouse picks up alongside the warmer weather, your floors will be under more stress than normal. Increased foot traffic and machine activity will take a toll on your floors, and so will temperature fluctuations, ground shifts, and other environmental factors. If you’re not prepared, your warehouse flooring may require serious attention during and after the season, slowing down your operations. Moreover, damaged flooring is a serious hazard, especially in a highly active facility. Prioritizing proper commercial floor care will ultimately save you time and money while increasing efficiency and safety outcomes. With that in mind, here are our top 5 tips for warehouse floor care this spring.

Five Tips for Warehouse Floor Care

1. Keep Up with Your Landscaping

It might seem odd to start a conversation about floor care with a piece about landscaping. However, external factors are responsible for a significant portion of floor problems. After all, the dust that winds up on warehouse flooring has to come from somewhere – more often than not, floors become dirty when shoes and machines track in dirt and grime from outside the building. As such, maintaining a clean exterior is just as important as keeping things clean inside your warehouse. An unkempt landscape breeds pests, bacteria, debris, and other contaminants that don’t belong indoors. Springtime is of particular concern because of all growth and activity that takes place during this time. By properly caring for your facility’s green spaces, you greatly reduce the amount of detritus that winds up coating your floors. Proper landscaping includes mowing, trimming, edging, fertilizing, pest removal, erosion control, and more.

2. Install Quality Coatings and Coverings

If you want your floors to remain in decent shape all spring long (and beyond), you need to provide them with some protection. Floor coatings, coverings, and fortifying methods help prevent harmful substances from harming your floors. Floor coverings refer to unfixed materials that lay over your floor, such as mats, tiling systems, carpets, and so on. These are effective at capturing dirt and moisture, so they don’t reach the underlying floor (of course, because of this, they require a fair amount of cleaning). Floor coatings are paint-like, adhesive substances that bond to the floor itself, sealing its pores. These protective coatings can mitigate moisture intrusion, combat chemicals, increase traction, enhance appearance, and more. Other solutions like concrete polishing also fortify and protect your warehouse floors by grinding down the concrete and applying a densifier. Any of these solutions (or a combination of them) will reduce the amount of strain placed on your floors, giving them longer life.

3. Maintain Strong Floor Cleaning Protocols

Even if your floors are thoroughly protected by high-quality coatings or coverings, they still require regular cleaning. If your warehouse is more active during spring, you’ll likely have to ramp up your commercial cleaning protocols, too. It’s important to develop a strategy for floor care that deals with daily/regular operations and periodic needs. For instance, most warehouse floors benefit from daily-to-weekly sweeping, vacuuming, and/or mopping. Most warehouse floors also require deeper cleaning, minor repairs, and other adjustments on a less frequent basis. These periodic protocols might include burnishing or buffing, refinishing, steam cleaning/shampooing (for commercial carpet care), stripping and waxing, tile and grout restoration, etc. The exact nature and cadence of your warehouse’s floor care plan will depend on the type of your flooring, your warehouse’s level of activity and size, and other factors. Establishing a custom floor care plan will yield the most optimal outcomes for your warehouse.

4. Refresh Your Line Striping

A warehouse without well-painted floor lines is like a map without names. Line striping is necessary for organization, personnel safety, and communication. These markers vary by shape, size, and color, and some feature stenciling to clearly communicate words like “stop,” “danger,” etc. Without them, workers and other occupants may end up standing somewhere they shouldn’t be or interfering with someone else’s work. If the paint on your warehouse flooring has begun to fade, what better time is there than spring to revitalize this aspect of your facility? Indeed, periodic line striping is a key component of commercial floor maintenance, guiding personnel, so they navigate in an orderly fashion – this increased organization reduces the chaos your floors would otherwise endure, helping them hold up longer.

5. Invest in New Floor Cleaning Technology

It’s one thing to put an optimized floor care plan in place – it’s another to execute it effectively. Ongoing floor maintenance requires significant resources. Even if your warehouse is well-staffed, floor care might not be everyone’s top priority (especially when things get busy). The more you can automate your floor care needs, the better. These days, commercial floor cleaning machines can be programmed to do a whole host of tasks with minimal oversight. Indeed, some of these machines will even learn as they go with artificial intelligence (AI) technology, constantly finding more efficient methods and optimal routes to cut costs and minimize interference. Springtime is busy, so leaving some of this important busywork to the machines is welcome in just about any warehouse. Read our previous blog, “How The Budd Group Implements Robotics for Commercial Carpet Care,” for more on this exciting topic.

Spring into Action with the Right Floor Care Methods for Your Warehouse

Floors are among the most important features of any warehouse. Don’t take them for granted this season (or any season, for that matter). If you need expert advice and/or action when it comes to commercial floor care, The Budd Group has you covered with customized floor care plans, state-of-the-art floor cleaning technology, multiple maintenance solutions, and more. To learn more about our services and values, give us a call today at 800-221-8158!