LVT gets sold to people as the low maintenance option, and to be fair to it, it mostly is. But we get a lot of calls that go the same way: the floor is only a few years old, it is looking flat and cloudy, and nothing the owner does is bringing it back.
Nine times out of ten that floor is not worn out. It is covered in something.
Dull is not the same as worn
This is the first thing to get straight, because the two need completely different answers.
A worn LVT floor has lost its wear layer. That is the clear layer on the top that protects the printed design underneath. Once that has gone through, you are looking at replacement, and no cleaning is fixing it.
A dull LVT floor has a film on top of it. Cleaner residue, polish, gloss restorer, whatever has been put down over the years. The floor underneath is perfectly fine. It is just buried.
A quick way to tell which one you have got
Pull the sofa out, or lift a rug, and look at the bit that never gets walked on.
If that hidden bit looks the same dull, flat colour as the rest of the room, it is residue. Nobody has been walking there, so nothing has worn. It is the cleaner that has got everywhere.
If that hidden bit still looks fresh and the walkways look grey and flat, then that is genuine wear, and we need to have a different conversation.
What is putting that film on your floor
Most of it comes from a bottle.
Multi-surface sprays and supermarket floor cleaners. A lot of these have a soap or a gloss agent in them, which is what makes your floor look great for about an hour after you have done it. None of that rinses off. It goes down in a layer, then next week you put another layer on top of it.
Washing up liquid. People use it because it is there and it is cheap. It is a degreaser with soap in it and it leaves a film every single time.
Shine restorers and floor polish. These are the worst of the lot for LVT, and they are the ones people reach for exactly when the floor has gone dull, so it turns into a spiral. They coat the floor in a plastic-type layer. That layer wears unevenly, it goes patchy and it shows every footprint, and after a while it starts to yellow. Then you cannot clean it off with a mop, because a mop is not what takes it off.
Steam mops. Heat plus water on a vinyl floor softens things, drives moisture into the joints and can lift the edges of the planks. It also cooks whatever residue is already there onto the surface.
The other half of it is grit
Modern LVT is embossed to look like real timber. That is why it looks so convincing. But that texture, all those grain lines and the bevels between planks, is somewhere for dirt to sit.
A mop goes over the top of that. It does not get down into it. So you end up with fine grit and dirt sitting in every grain line across the whole floor, which reads to your eye as a floor that just looks grey and never quite looks clean.
That grit is also doing damage while it sits there. It is harder than your wear layer, and every time somebody walks across it, it is being ground in. There is more on that in our piece on mopping versus professional deep cleaning.
What a deep clean does about it
The reason a deep clean deals with this and a mop does not is the extraction.
We use a professional scrubber-extractor. It has two brushes that turn against each other, so they get down into the embossing and the bevels rather than skating over the top. It puts a pH neutral solution down, works it in, and then sucks the dirty solution straight back off the floor in the same pass.
That does two things at once. It lifts the grit out of the texture, and it takes the residue film off with it, rather than smearing it about and leaving it to dry back down again.
Your floor is walk-on dry within minutes, because the water never sits on it. On LVT that matters, because water getting into the joints of a floating floor is how you get lifting edges.
What you are left with is the sheen the floor actually came with. Not a polish, not a coating. Just the floor, with nothing on top of it.
What to use on it from now on
Keep it simple. This is genuinely all LVT needs, and the same thinking applies to timber, which we cover in cleaning engineered wood floors without ruining them.
- Dry dust two or three times a week. A microfibre dust mop. This is the important one, because you are lifting the grit before it gets ground in.
- Damp mop with a pH neutral cleaner made for vinyl or LVT. Well wrung out. If you can see wet on the floor behind you, that is too much water.
- Nothing with a gloss agent, a polish or a shine restorer in it. If the bottle promises shine, that is the bottle causing the problem.
- No steam mop.
- Matting at the door, and a decent length of it, not a wee square. In a tenement, inside your own door, because the close is where all the grit is.
- Felt pads under furniture, and check them once a year. A worn pad picks up a bit of grit and turns into a cutting tool.
When it is past cleaning
We would rather say this up front.
If your wear layer has gone through, cleaning will not bring it back. You will see it as a dulled patch that does not change no matter what you do, or in bad cases the printed pattern starting to fade out in the middle of a walkway. That plank or that area needs replaced.
Same with a plank that has been gouged or that has lifted at the edge from water. LVT cannot be sanded or refinished the way timber can, so there is no repairing it, only swapping it. If you have got a few spare planks in the cupboard from when it was fitted, that is a straightforward job. If you have not, we will have a look at matching it.
The honest position is this. Cleaning is worth doing on almost every LVT floor we see, because almost every one of them is residue rather than wear. But we will tell you when it is not.
Common questions
How often should LVT be professionally cleaned?
Normal house, once a year. Busy family house with kids and a dog, every six months. Commercial or an HMO, every three to six months.
Will it get rid of scratches?
No. A deep clean takes dirt and residue off. Scratches in the wear layer are physical damage and they stay. What it will do is stop the fine scratching getting worse, because most of that is caused by grit that should not be there.
I have already used polish on it. Is that a problem?
It is not the end of the world, it just means there is more to take off. Tell us when we come out so we know what we are dealing with, because a heavy build-up sometimes needs a second pass.
Is the machine safe on a floating LVT floor?
Yes. The reason is that the solution is extracted as it goes down, so the floor is never saturated and nothing is sitting on the joints waiting to soak in.
Related questions
If your LVT has gone flat and you are not sure whether it is dirty or worn, that is exactly the sort of thing we can tell you in a couple of minutes. Get a free quote or give us a ring on 0131 285 6435.
We look after floors across Edinburgh, East Lothian, Midlothian and West Lothian.
