What About Those No-Rinse Tile Cleaners?

Oftentimes, I am asked if there is a way to clean tile and grout with a no-rinse cleaner. Everyone is looking for a quick way to get their tile and grout clean without a lot of effort so they choose to use a floor cleaner that claims it is a no-rinse rather than using one that requires rinsing. Both kinds can loosen the dirt well from the tile and grout and float it to the top to be removed. They are different, though, in other ways.

Most cleaners use surfactants to do their work. This additive increases the wetness of water. This decreases the surface tension of water, allowing the cleaner to more effectively lift the dirt from the surface. There is something about the no-rinse cleaners that gets me, though, so I will use an analogy to explain it.

Let’s imagine you had a great year financially, so you buy yourself a mustang. You wax it regularly so it’s easier to wipe off the bugs when you drive down the coast. Let’s compare that to using a sealer to protect your grout. Imagine you took a long weekend and drove all over the coast and now need to clean your mustang. You get out your sponge and bucket, as well as your no-rinse cleaner. You wipe the entire car down with the cleaner and expect it to be clean, right? Well, probably not. All you really did is wipe the dead bug guts around more evenly on your car. The dirt doesn’t just vaporize off your car.

In the same way, the dirt can’t vaporize off your tile and grout from using the no-rinse cleaners. In fact, most of the dirt is removed from the floor through rinsing off the dirt that was brought to the surface. Even when you rinse, if you don’t use a new mop head, you leave dirt on your floor.

So how to you really get your floor clean? Well you can hire a tile floor cleaning company in Mobile AL like us at Nurse's Touch.

It’s a tough pill for some to swallow when they hear the truth about the no-rinse cleaners. If you don’t believe it, though, simply wipe the floor with a white cloth after cleaning it and see how dirty the towel is. The dirt doesn’t just disappear.

By using the no-rinse cleaner, the tile and grout will look dingy after a while from the dirt building up. Regardless of the type of cleaner you use, though, the only way to keep it clean is to dry it. If you choose not to dry it, plan to give your floor a heavy scrubbing once or twice a year to keep it looking nice.