Laminate flooring allows you to enjoy beautiful wood floor style at a fraction of the price of solid or engineered hardwood planks. Laminate flooring is good looking, easy to lay and easy to maintain. However, one of the drawbacks of laminate flooring is its inability to resist water. Because of the rapid absorption of water into the planks’ fibreboard core, any puddles left on the floor can result in swelling, cupping and lifting. For this reason, you must be careful to keep liquids away from your laminate floor. But how do you clean it? In this article we’ll go over the best cleaners for laminate flooring and the methods that you should stick to when it comes to cleansing.
Dry Cleaning
The first step of cleaning a laminate floor is dry cleaning. This doesn’t mean you need to take your floors to your local dry cleaners, it just means that you should sweep or mop without any liquids whatsoever. Use a soft bristled broom, a vacuum cleaner with a hard floor attachment or a dry mop to pick up any large particles on the floor. This is the most important step when it comes to cleaning laminate flooring as you’ll be able to get most of the cleaning done without using any liquids whatsoever.
Damp Mopping
Following a good sweeping or vacuuming you can finish the job with a damp mop. You need to make sure the mop is only slightly damp. You can’t use the same amount of liquid that you would use on water resistant floors such as vinyl, linoleum or tile etc. You can make your own cleaning fluid by diluting ammonia, vinegar, window cleaner or a couple drops of dish soap in a bucket of water. Just make sure to completely wring out the mop after soaking. It should feel almost dry to the touch. There are also laminate floor cleaning solutions available on the market. You usually spray these cleaners onto the mop or directly onto the floor before mopping. Disposable mopping pads have recently become popular and they actually work quite well on laminate floors. Once again, just be careful that too much fluid doesn’t get on the floor while cleaning.
