It’s important to have not only an effective hard floor care program, but a smarter one that reduces the amount of labor required to maintain floors over time. Labor is the largest and most expensive variable in floor care. Most of the costs associated with hard floor maintenance don’t come from products, they come from repeatedly performing the same restorative work.

How Do You Keep Floor Care Costs Down?

The most effective way to control floor care costs is not by cleaning more often, but by reducing how often floors need to be stripped and recoated. When a floor care program fails to adequately protect the floor, maintenance becomes reactive. Floors show wear sooner, dirt embeds faster, and stripping becomes routine rather than occasional. The result is a cycle of stripping and recoating that consumes time, budget, and staff resources.

This challenge is especially visible in high-demand environments, such as schools, where summer maintenance windows are short and highly pressured. Custodial teams are expected to restore large areas of flooring in limited timeframes, often with reduced staff. When a floor care program accelerates wear, crews are forced to strip more often, turning summer maintenance into a yearly scramble.

Similar challenges exist in healthcare environments, where floors need to be cleaned daily, and can often degrade faster than expected. Constant foot traffic, equipment movement, chemical exposure, and alcohol spills place significant stress on floor finishes. 

Many facilities end up stripping floors that don’t technically need it because the program itself is designed around stripping floors instead of maintaining them.

If frequent stripping is what drives labor costs, then the real question becomes: how do you design a floor care program that avoids constant resets?

How Do You Build the Right Floor Care Program?

Most traditional floor care programs are reset-driven. They rely on stripping and recoating as the primary response to wear, often on a fixed schedule rather than actual floor condition. A maintenance-driven program takes a different approach, one focused on extending finish life, reducing aggressive restoration, and stripping only when it’s truly necessary.

Buckeye's Hard Foor Care Program is maintenance-first.

We do this with superior products that are durable and clear.

Our floor care program is designed to reduce labor by eliminating the need for full floor stripping. Instead of removing every layer of finish and starting from bare floor, we focus on removing just the top 1–2 worn layers of finish. This process is called a top-scrub and recoat.

During a top-scrub, the surface is deep cleaned using specialized pads and cleaners that remove embedded soil and the damaged top layers of finish without cutting all the way down to the base. After the surface is properly prepared, a new coat of finish is applied to restore gloss and protection. The process is controlled and targeted, removing only what is necessary instead of resetting the entire floor system. This reduces labor time, chemical use, facility downtime, and overall disruption while preserving the integrity of the floor underneath.

Durability and Clarity

Durability and clarity are critical to making top-scrub and recoat shine. Our floor finishes are built with Renaissance Performance Polymers designed to resist yellowing and powdering, two common causes of premature stripping. When finishes maintain clarity over time, facilities can perform true top scrub and recoat procedures instead of defaulting to full stripping.

Daily maintenance chemistry also plays a key role. pH-neutral floor cleaners help preserve finish integrity during routine cleaning, preventing the gradual degradation that leads to unnecessary recoating. When stripping is required, modern stripper technology reduces dwell time and labor while eliminating the need for harsher chemistries traditionally associated with stripping floors. Our floor strippers also work on multiple coats of finish in one application, further reducing product and labor costs when compared to competitive floor strippers.

Together, these elements allow floor care programs to shift away from constant resets and toward long-term performance, reducing labor demands while extending floor life and controlling total cost.

Our Hard Floor Care Program is composed of many elements to make your floors shine and last longer without costing you more money than you need to spend on labor and tools. If you’re interested in learning more about our Hard Floor Care Program, reach out to one of our local representatives below.

There are many factors that go into the selection of a floor stripper for your facility. What kind of equipment are you planning to use? What type of flooring are you going to strip? Are you stripping a flat surface? What are your time constraints?

All Buckeye floor strippers are formulated with patented Liquescent^® technology to remove floor finish in one application without harsh odors. Liquescent technology has enabled Buckeye to manufacture high performance products while adhering to our principle of human health and safety.

Buckeye floor strippers are designed to strip floors in nearly any facility. When evaluating your hard floor care needs, Buckeye representatives take all of the above questions and more into consideration. Here are some defining features of Buckeye floor strippers that may help in deciding which one is right for your facility:

RipSaw^®

RipSaw is Buckeye’s everyday stripper. It’s fast acting with a reduced dwell time, helping you get the job done quicker. It also comes with a built-in Automatic Dilution Indicator^® (ADI) for ease of use. When diluting the product, the solution turns cloudy, indicating you have achieved the desired dilution rate without “over-using” your floor stripper. It can strip floor finishes from any hard surface in one application.

Juggernaut^®

Juggernaut is Buckeye’s Ultimate Cold-Water Stripper. It is Buckeye’s go-to product for difficult floor finish. Juggernaut can safely and efficiently strip heavily burnished hard floors including tile, concrete, or masonry. It is designed to work in one application, reducing the amount of time and labor put in to stripping your floors.

Specialty Floor Strippers

Some facilities have more unique needs. For those that are environmentally conscious, Buckeye offers Penetrate™. Penetrate is non-DOT corrosive, and Green Seal™ certified. Buckeye’s S.W.A.T.^® NA works just as well as any other floor stripper, but without ammonia. For workers, this means no noxious vapors and a more pleasant scent to provide a better working environment.

Facilities with flooring made of rubber, linoleum, and Marmoleum are in need of a pH sensitive floor stripper. For that, Buckeye offers Liquid Shovel^®. Revelation^® is Buckeye’s more versatile floor stripper. It is usable on all industrial flooring including resilient tile, terrazzo, concrete, rubber, etc. It effectively strips acrylic seals, water-based urethanes, and polymer floor finishes.

Buckeye also has an aerosol can baseboard stripping gel, Base Hit™. It sticks to vertical surfaces and is specifically designed to remove floor finish buildup and heavy soils from baseboards as well as resilient tile and hard surface flooring.

But, floor stripper selection is only one component of Buckeye’s Hard Floor Care Program. Buckeye’s Hard Floor Care Program includes a variety of floor strippers and finishes designed to keep any facility floor protected and sparkling. These products come with hands-on training from Buckeye representatives. The Hard Floor Care Program gives your staff the proper products and training needed to keep your facility looking its best.

Contact your local Buckeye representative to find out which Buckeye floor stripper will work best in your facility.

The appearance of your floors can have an immense impact on your facility’s first impression. A complete floor care program is the best way to keep your floors looking their best. Buckeye’s Hard Floor Care Program can be customized to fit the floor type, cost, and maintenance needs of your facility. Buckeye floor finishes are non-yellowing and non-powdering. They protect your floors from highly abrasive soils and extend the life of your floors.

The complete Buckeye Hard Floor Care Program can extend your strip cycles to three years. However, even the strongest, most effective floor finishes need to be stripped in order to keep your facility floor looking its best.

Buckeye floor strippers are formulated with patented Liquescent^® technology to remove floor finish with one application. Each floor stripper works in cold water, helping to save energy. They are butyl-free and do not have harsh odors.

Buckeye’s floor strippers include Juggernaut^®, Liquid Shovel^®, Penetrate^™, Revelation^®, RipSaw^®, S.W.A.T.^® NA, and Base Hit^™. They work in one application to liquefy the toughest crosslinking floor finishes.

Juggernaut, Penetrate, RipSaw, S.W.A.T. NA, and Revelation are meant for all types of flooring while Base Hit and Liquid Shovel were designed for specialized application. Base Hit is a baseboard stripping gel that can emulsify floor finish buildup on baseboards, resilient tiles, and hard surface flooring. Liquid Shovel is a mild pH floor stripper that works best on pH sensitive flooring such as rubber, linoleum, and Marmoleum^®.

Other unique features of Buckeye floor strippers include RipSaw’s Automatic Dilution Indicator (ADI^®). When diluting the product, the solution will turn cloudy, allowing you to achieve the desired dilution ratio without wasting floor stripper.

Penetrate is Buckeye’s Green Seal^™ certified environmental floor stripper. It meets Green Seal standard GS-40 and is safer for both workers and the environment.

Buckeye floor strippers are designed to remove the most stubborn floor finishes on a variety of floor types. Contact your Buckeye representative to find out more about Buckeye floor strippers and Buckeye’s Hard Floor Care Program.

What should your facility’s temperature and humidity be to ensure successful floor finish application? Many temperature and humidity combinations can produce successful results, however, one strict limit to follow is that the air and floor must be at least 55°F.

Pay special attention to areas where it can be colder such as near exterior doors, or the freezer aisle. Also, consider instances when the floor finish is left inside a cold vehicle, and always allow the cold floor finish to warm to room temperature. Applying a cold floor finish to a warm floor (or vice versa) challenges the floor finish to form a proper film. This can cause lack of gloss, and the floor finish could easily powder causing durability issues. Your floor finish should be 55°F. To measure the floor temperature, place a thermometer on the floor and cover the bulb with a Styrofoam cup. After about 30 minutes, read the thermometer.

The Buckeye Hard Floor Care Program includes a comprehensive training for your staff to ensure that products are being used correctly and efficiently. This program is dedicated to providing the most extensive customer support that can help solve flooring issues even when the cause isn’t obvious. With Buckeye’s Hard Floor Care Program, you can customize the most successful floor care program for your facility. Contact us today to learn more.

Gloss retention is reliant on the equipment being used. The operation of the autoscrubber and burnisher, the dust mop, and the selection of the proper cleaner, can all impact the longevity of a floor care program. An important factor to consider is the variables between staff and the technique used to apply floor finishes.

For example, let’s say that there are three different cleaning staff members applying the same floor finish. The first one applies the coats very thin. At the end of the day there are only two coats, instead of six coats applied. Each of the coats covered at 6,000 square feet per gallon, producing a very thin coat. The second person applies medium coats, each at 1,500 – 2,000 square feet per gallon. This results in better looking floors for a longer amount of time. The third person applies heavy coats, each at 800 – 1,000 square feet per gallon. Since the coats are so heavy they take a very long time to dry tack-free. The residual moisture and solvents in floor finishes can take months to fully evaporate out of the film. This extremely long time to cure means an unusually soft coating that doesn’t wear well.

Even though each person used the same floor finish, they each ended up getting different results. The Buckeye^® Floor Care Program includes a comprehensive training program for your staff to ensure the products are being used correctly and efficiently. The program can be tailored to meet your specific needs and Buckeye is dedicated to providing the most extensive customer support.

Schools and universities can be a challenge to keep clean with the amount of high traffic every year. The Buckeye Honors Program is a complete online custodial training program for schools and universities. It presents the products, procedures, and training needed to meet your school or university’s highest standards.

The goal is to make cleaning and maintenance procedures easy and rewarding, while providing products that are safe for workers, students, and staff to be around. It is also important that the products are safe for the environment, but still produce excellent results. Quality products are key to having an efficient cleaning program at any school or university, but so is providing staff with the knowledge of how to use the products. The Honors Program website provides online training in routine cleaning, restroom, shower and locker room cleaning, carpet care, hard floor care, gym floor care, food service procedures, and product safety. The procedures are presented with easy to follow directions that are researched and proven to increase efficiency and make any clean goals maintainable.

The website features the complete program and materials that are available 24 hours a day for your convenience. You and your cleaning staff can login and view training videos broken into segments including routine cleaning, restroom, shower and locker room cleaning, carpet care, and more. There are also corresponding customizable PowerPoint presentations, training manuals, Safety Data Sheets (SDS), product literature, and wall charts. An additional benefit is that you and your staff can assess your Honors Program knowledge with tests that are available for each video segment.

The Honors Program website also makes cleaning simple with five basic steps for any area in your school or university including classrooms, hallways, lobby/entrances, cafeterias, gymnasiums and more. The five basic steps are high dust, spot clean, dust mop, empty trash, and damp mop. There are also surveys that are part of the program that allow supervisors to rate the cleanliness of a particular part of a facility. Whenever a school first implements the program they can use the surveys to rate the cleanliness and appearance of the entire facility. This can act as a baseline going forward with the program, and can be repeated after a few months of training. These results can show the staff were there has been improvement, and where certain areas are lacking. While using the survey the user can add comments, and take and attach pictures of the areas in question.

Whether your school has the largest campus in the area or the smallest, the Honors Program can be customized to your needs. Watch the video here to learn more.

 

It can be challenging to keep any floor surface clean, and doing so without removing floor finish can be extra difficult. Floor pads can help keep any floor surface clean and last longer. There are many factors to consider when using floor pads such as types of floor pads, choosing the right floor pad for your facility, proper floor pad maintenance, and how to use them correctly.

There are different types of pads to fit your needs such as burnishing pads, polishing and cleaning pads, stripping pads, and specialty pads. Some burnishing pads can be used for burnishing multiple times per week, even nightly, and can provide a “wet look.” Other burnishing pads should be used when the finish is freshly applied, helping the finish to cure while increasing the gloss and reducing black marks. A strip pad is for wet stripping with the properly diluted floor stripper. A heavy-duty strip pad is an aggressive, open weave constructed pad that will not clog up and should also be used with the properly diluted floor stripper.

You may have to use specialty pads to remove all of the dirty finish down to the base coats and for wood floor prep. Several brands of auto-scrubbers and burnishers have operator-adjustable pad pressure. It is easy to grind off your finish by dialing up too much pad pressure. If you have a young finish and a machine with pre-set pad pressure, the use of softer pads is the better choice. This means you could use either a white or high-speed buffing pad. When a floor finish is cured and harder, use a red pad. You may be able to use a red pad when the finish is young, applying modest pressure. Then, as the floor finish becomes harder and more cured, use a red pad, applying more pad pressure. The best philosophy to practice is this: if you aren’t intending to apply a fresh coat of finish and don’t want your auto-scrubber dulling out the floors, use softer pads and less pad pressure.

If you are using a plug-in electric machine and you are early on in the floor buffing stages, a gorilla light pad is recommended. Later, you can switch to a more aggressive full hair pad, especially if you have deep scratches. Aggressive pads do a better job repairing floors while softer pads produce better shine. If you are using a propane machine early on in the floor buffing stages, a white pad is recommended. And later you can switch to a more aggressive gorilla light or moderate pad such as blue ice or beige. If a floor needs serious repair but you also want the best shine, buff floors once with aggressive pads for repair. Then buff again with a soft pad to remove the buff haze that happens with more aggressive pads.

You can use floor pads in conjunction with the Buckeye Hard Floor Care program. Buckeye floor finishes are formulated with proprietary technology that never yellows or powders, and the butyl-free floor strippers remove floor finish in one application without harsh odor. Buckeye’s quality products prove to customers that safety and improved product performance can coincide. Buckeye offers an extensive branded line of cleaning and maintenance products that work together to create a customized program for your facility. Each product is designed with quality, innovation, and integrity in mind. Check out more about the Buckeye Hard Floor Care Program here.

What types of flooring do you have in your facility? Whether your facility has hardwood, concrete, laminate, tile, or any other type of flooring, it is crucial to value floor care. There are many benefits to following an effective floor care program at your facility: improved appearance, durability to hold up to heavy traffic, safety, the list goes on. Your floor care needs are specific to you because no floors are exactly alike.

Floor care doesn’t stop at having a good cleaner. You need a program that also includes floor finish and floor stripper – you will extend the life of your floors and people will notice. Buckeye International has developed cleaning/maintenance products that make caring about floor care easier. Any flooring is in investment that should be taken care of for years to come. No matter what your floor care needs are, Buckeye will customize the most successful and efficient program for you.

Click here to learn more about the Buckeye Hard Floor Care Program.