Why does grout keep getting darker when you mop every week? Because the mop is part of the problem. Grout lines sit a little lower than the tile, and every pass of a mop leaves a thin film of dirty water behind that runs into those low channels and dries there. Grout is porous, so it soaks that water up along with whatever was in it. After a couple of years of good housekeeping, light gray grout can look nearly brown.
Fine sand from the yard makes it worse. It gets tracked across the kitchen, settles into the lines, and holds onto the grime around it. A mop pushes it around without lifting it out.
The buffer does the scrubbing
We clean tile and grout with a machine buffer, a floor machine that spins a scrubbing pad or brush flat against the floor. It's a lot of steady pressure in a small area, far more than anyone can manage on their knees with a toothbrush, and it works across the face of the tile and down into the grout lines at once.
Your technician walks the floor with you first, checks what the tile is made of, notes any cracked or missing grout, and gives you the price. Then a pH-balanced cleaner goes down and gets a few minutes to loosen the grease and soil. The buffer comes next. It works the floor section by section, lifting the buildup out of the grout so it can be picked up along with the dirty solution. Corners and edges the machine can't reach get scrubbed by hand. Not much water is used, so there's no flooding along the baseboards or under the cabinets, and most floors are dry enough to walk on within the hour.
Cleaned grout usually comes up several shades lighter. On some floors it goes right back to the color it was the day it was installed. On others, years of staining or a dye from a spill has gotten into the grout itself, and it lightens a lot without ever looking brand new. Your technician can usually tell which kind you have during the walkthrough.
Natural stone and the rooms we do
Marble, travertine, limestone and slate are all fine with this method, because the cleaner is pH-balanced and has no acid in it. Ceramic and porcelain are the easiest of all. Kitchens are the most common job we do, followed by bathrooms, entryways, mudrooms and laundry rooms. We also clean tile in garages and small offices.
One opinion we hold firmly: keep vinegar and bleach off your grout. Vinegar is an acid, so it etches stone and slowly eats at cement grout, and bleach mostly lightens the stain on top while leaving the dirt in place. A pH-neutral floor cleaner and a well-wrung mop do far less harm between professional cleanings.
Repairs are a separate trade
Cracked, crumbling or missing grout needs a tile contractor to regrout it. Cleaning won't put back what's gone, and a buffer on loose grout can pull more of it out, which is why the tech checks for it at the start. Chipped tile and hollow-sounding tiles that have come loose from the floor are repair problems too.
Booking
Bring up the $45 tile coupon when you book. Call 803-393-7625 with a rough idea of the square footage and which rooms you want done, or reach us through the contact page. If you want to read more first, our sister site Tile Done Right has a longer explanation of why machine scrubbing gets grout clean when mopping won't.