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Fall 2007 - Article 3
From The Lab
Stripping Heavy Build-Up
This summer a few Essential employees had the “pleasure” of working with a local school district stripping their floors. We knew things were not going to be easy since many of the floors had not been stripped for nine years! Here are some of the things we learned while stripping these floors:
- There are no shortcuts when dealing with heavily finished floors. Auto-scrubbers, swing machines and even propane stripping machines were not up to the task. We had to hand scrape the floors with modified ice-scrapers. Usually two scrapings were enough – sometimes three were needed.
- Proper dwell time of the stripper (Xlerate™ #2917 in this case) is critical. Applying a heavy coat of stripper, waiting 5 minutes and remopping with more stripper and then waiting another 5 – 10 minutes before scraping was the protocol.
- The material we scraped off was a gooey mess so it was not disposed of down the drain. It was funneled into an empty drum for later disposal. Using wet vacuums or auto-scrubbers to pick up the “goop” is not advisable.
- After scraping, the floor was machine scrubbed with black pads. At this point the floor was ready for wet vacuuming and rinsing.
The school district is now moving to a 2 – 3 year
no-strip program using both Durabrite® (#253) and X-Coat™ (#264) throughout their schools. They don’t want to spend the entire summer stripping floors ever again.
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