Solving Your Toughest Flooring Woes This Winter Starts at the Front Door

Many areas of the country are dealing with an especially harsh winter. But even a mild winter can have a major impact on your building’s indoor environment, overall safety, and air quality. And one of the biggest culprits making cold-weather life harder for facility managers isn’t snow, sleet, or moisture: It’s ice melt.

Everyone uses ice melt because it works. It sticks to outdoor surfaces and helps reduce the buildup of frozen precipitation. Unfortunately, its adherence isn’t limited to outdoor walkways and parking lots — ice melt also attaches to shoes.

This means when people walk into your building after stepping on ice melt outside, they track the ice melt wherever they go. This creates two major headaches:

• The first is that once inside, some ice melt reacts with cleaning solutions to leave an oily residue on hard surfaces. It’s tough to wipe up and slippery to the touch, which is a slip-and-fall hazard waiting to happen.
   
• The second is that some chemicals in ice melt, such as calcium chloride or magnesium chloride, can permanently damage floors, including ones that aren’t carpeted. That shiny, polished terrazzo floor with an acrylic finish or densifier in your lobby? Or your glossy concrete floor showroom? Both types of surfaces can end up looking dull as ice melt robs them of their protective coatings.

Of course, you can’t just stop relying on ice melt. It serves its purpose well, after all. However, you can do something about the problem: Stop the ice melt (and other unwanted debris) from entering your spaces by installing a proper entryway system.

Leaving Ice Melt Woes at the Front Door

Advanced entryway systems consist of several flooring zones or components. They can block the majority of debris and moisture from being tracked into your building. Still, simply having an entryway system isn’t sufficient to completely address your ice melt and winter weather concerns. You need to maintain those entryway systems, too.

Imagine that 100 employees, customers, and guests walk over your entryway system over the lunchtime hour. During that period, the entryway will become saturated with ice melt and sludge. In that condition, it can no longer do its job without intervention.

This is where MilliCare comes into the picture. We can flush your facility’s entryway system and free the mats of built-up gunk. To accomplish this goal, we use a combination of cleaning methods, beginning with firm agitations applied using a counter-rotating brush machine to loosen ice melt particles. Then, we perform a hot-water extraction with a crystallizing acid rinse. Over time, consistent and repeated application of these processes beat the problem of tracked-in ice melt and also reduce the risk of costly on-site slip-and-fall incidents.

What if your building has exterior matting as part of your entryway system, too? That’s another terrific choice for giving ice melt the boot at the door. Just don’t forget to clean it as well. Our technicians are familiar with ways to agitate and extract exterior matting overnight, allowing it to dry completely before the next morning’s rush of visitors.

The yearly battle to keep ice melt where it belongs doesn’t have to wear you — or your floors — down. Just partner with a service provider like MilliCare that can help you get ahead of the problem and stay on top of entryway maintenance throughout the season.
 

Want to learn more about MilliCare and how our processes can work to keep ice melt from drifting into your facility? Find a MilliCare location near you.