Winter floor care in Michigan: beating road salt at the front door

Why is road salt so hard on floors?

Salt performs a vital role outdoors. According to MDOT, salt efficiently melts snow and ice when temperatures are between 20 and 30 degrees. Below 20 degrees it works slower and can make roads ice over quicker, and below 10 degrees MDOT starts spreading sand. For most of the Metro Detroit winter, parking lots and sidewalks are laden with salt, slush, and grit, and every set of boots tracks some inside.

Inside, the melted salt water evaporates, leaving behind the white film everyone here knows from January lobby floors. One floor cleaner manufacturer talks about salt and ice melter eating away at high-polish finishes. Michigan's environmental agency, EGLE, says road salt corrodes vehicles and buildings. Factor in the grit it spreads around, grinding at the finish with every footstep, and an entry can dull in a matter of months.

• Hard floors

  A white haze that dulls the finish and gets tracked through the lobby. You can see every footprint.

• Carpet

  White rings and hard, dull traffic lanes, most noticeable in front of entrances and elevators.

• Slips

  Slush that has melted on tile or stone is slippery. Dried ice melter powder spilled on a hard floor is slippery too.

• Soaked mats

  A saturated mat will quit absorbing water and begin passing it on to someone else's shoes.

How to stop road salt at the door

Here's a tip: The Carpet and Rug Institute doesn't recommend one rug. They recommend an entrance mat system. Scraper mats are placed immediately outside the building. Wiper and scraper mats go inside in the entryway. Then extra wiper mats further inside grab whatever's left on the bottom of shoes. CRI suggests 12 to 15 feet of matting for an office building, and as much as 20 to 25 feet for places like grocery stores or hospitals. In general, more matting is better. They also mention you may need different mats for different weather conditions, which in Michigan means a winter mat set. Busy store and mall entrances belong on the long end of the scale; our shopping mall cleaning guide covers them.

Observe how the mats wear down. CRI notes that if you are seeing excessive wear in one spot, you may not be using mats that are large enough. Keep the mats themselves clean as well: a gritty, salt-soaked mat just gives it right back to the next person's shoes. On storm days, keep a dry set handy to switch out when the first set gets saturated.

Outside: clear first, then de-ice

OSHA's winter safety suggestions tell employers to remove snow and ice and apply deicer to walking surfaces as soon as possible after a winter storm. Order of operations is important. By shoveling and plowing first, you take away the snow and ice that salt would otherwise have to melt. That means you use less salt overall and have less salt to track into your lobby.

Apply as needed, not as much as you can. EGLE's winter maintenance best practices guide recommends application rates tailored to site-specific conditions and reminds users that road salt is detrimental to plant life and can increase chlorides in lakes and rivers. MDOT's statistics demonstrate that more isn't necessarily better: Salt becomes less effective the colder it gets. When temps drop below approximately 10 degrees, MDOT starts using sand for traction instead.

How do you remove road salt film from floors?

1. 1

   Dry first

   Before wet cleaning, dust mop or vacuum grit and residual ice melter pellets. Parkside even has this step first in their salt remover instructions, and it prevents grit from being scrubbed into the finish.

2. 2

   Use a cleaner made for salt

   Salt removers and neutralizers are designed to dissolve the white film that tracked-in ice melter leaves behind. One Canadian manufacturer, Parkside, describes its winter cleaner formula as dissolving those entranceway deposits and guarding against salt attack on high-polish finishes.

3. 3

   Keep the water fresh

   Dirty solution simply transfers salt from tile to tile. Directions from the same manufacturer are just as direct: Once the solution in your bucket is dirty, throw it out and start fresh.

4. 4

   Scrub large floors by machine

   One pass of an auto scrubber deposits the solution, agitates, and vacuums up the water, leaving your entrance almost dry rather than wet.

5. 5

   Rinse salt out of carpet

   Vacuum the entrance carpet every day. Periodically throughout the winter rinse the salt from the fibers with an extractor.

6. 6

   Plan the spring reset

   Floors that fared the worst through the season typically require a scrub and recoat or a complete strip and refinish once the salt trucks are parked for the year.

Ideally you should treat your floors before the salt ever gets there. If you have hard floors due for a scrub and recoat, schedule it for the fall: a good coat of finish that's well maintained provides the salt and grit with something to wear down other than your floor. Then maintain the entrances more often from the first snow until the street sweepers return in the spring.

One more winter job belongs to someone else. When melting snow gets into a building through the roof or a foundation wall, that's water damage, and our sister company RMO Mitigation & Restoration handles it at (248) 845-0000.

A winter floor care checklist for your entrance

Winter floor care questions

How RCO Cleaning handles winter floor care in Metro Detroit

RCO keeps your Metro Detroit entrances in shape all winter long. Our team removes the salt film build-up from hard surface floors with our own heavy-duty equipment, including our floor scrubber. We also extract entrance carpet, and we can schedule additional rounds for you on stormy days. We work around your schedule including nights, weekends and holidays. After all, RCO doesn't sleep. It all begins when we schedule a free walkthrough and your quote is delivered to you within 24 hours.