Keeping your business premises clean has never been more important than now.
With Covid people have been fixated, now more than ever, on hygiene from both people around them and their surroundings.
This means that when people leave your building, and they’ve had an unpleasant experience with the hygiene of the place they will not remember the good service or product but the fact that the place was filthy.
However, with traditional methods of cleaning floors, it would take up to days, even weeks before you could reopen. This is because it needs to be cleaned and dried out without people or objects moving over it for several days.
The last thing you would want now is to shut down your business yourself to clean the building, this could leave you wondering for a better solution.
The past few years there have been several major developments to counter these problems, the main one being UV Curing, for this method there is UV curing equipment availabe.
By using UV radiation these machines have immediate curing capabilities, because of this traffic can immediately be brought back onto the floor. This method does not require days or even weeks to clean the floors of the premises and even disinfect surfaces by using specific UV radiation.
This technology has been around for several decades, but for the last decade major ground-breaking advancements have been made to allow for such use-cases.
It has been described as a “logical leap for contractors”, despite it’s futuristic nature.
Benefits in comparison to old methods.
With a modern UV floor curing machine, a hardwood floor (for example) can be done within hours instead of days. This is because the process is immediate and cures the new finish with a UV light within milliseconds of application. Because of this, you can put this floor back into action right after the treatment. Currently, this is the only method that allows for that.
Older methods, such as oil-based finishes need a full day at least in between coats en even longer to fully be cured onto the floor. This in turn will obviously cost more time and money.
This method was originally developed for time-efficient markets such as hospitals, restaurants, etc. But is now well developed enough for mass-market use, this new method, a cutting edge technology, is catching on for good reasons.
Predictions
This new method of UV curing seems to be a future vital part of the maintance sector. The technique has already been adopted for different purposes in a big array of industries. One of the bigger mass-market use cases is for standard UV naildrying systems, these are currrently being used in mass in the beauty industry.
The next logical step forward for flooring professionals would be to use the same technology for their floors, especially since it gives floors extra resistance for wear and tear uses.
Vinyl Flooring
Products for vinyl flooring are chosen by durability for withstanding high traffic and the ease of care and maintance. These product nowadays tend to look great as well, these products often emulate wood, stone and ceramic of the higher end.
UV coatings on other floors live PVC tiles and planks tend to provide a long-lasting and durable coating that can stand up to different garage chemicals or even the wear and tear of indoor sports acitvities like Squash.
Flooring manufacturers are currently using UV curing to get higher production rates while using less energy and floor space than would be possible with traditional solvent based coatings.
Wood Flooring
Parquet flooring, strips and hardwoord moldings use UV-curable coats on top of the floor. Waterborne and Full solids tend to provide great durability aswell.
Even UV curable stains are available nowadays, trim pieces and moldings can be UV cured to match the flooring pieces precisely, these also have less lead time than non UV vured flooring topcoats.
Wood flooring manufacturers use UV curing for less lead time and faster production rates, even higher product quality, immediately handling and package finished pieces can be achieved significantly reducing work processing time.
And for those who finish pine, a notoriously resinous wood, you could use a microwave-powered UV curing system. It’s the only one that will cure the coating without bringing the resins to the surface.