This beautiful slate floor installed in the Kitchen of a house in Southampton had tons of character but unfortunately years of use had left it looking rather washed out and was overdue for a deep clean and re-seal.
Cleaning Slate Tiled Floors
I set about scrubbing the floor using a hot water dilution of Tile Doctor Pro-Clean Tile and Grout cleaner combined 50:50 with NanoTech UltraClean which adds tiny abrasive particles to the solution to make a more effective cleaning product. The solution was left to dwell on the floor for a while before being scrubbed into the tiles with a rotary machine fitted with a black scrubbing pad; a stiff hand brush was used along the grout lines. The soiled solution was removed using a wet vacuum and floor thoroughly rinsed down with clean water. Pro-Clean works as a stripper as well as a cleaner and so any remaining sealer was also removed using this process, had that been a problem I would of resorted to Tile Doctor Remove and Go which is a much stronger coatings remover.
The soiled cleaning solution was removed using a wet vacuum and this was followed by washing down the area thoroughly with clean water; any stubborn marks were revisited with a repeat of the same process until we were happy the tiles were clean.
Sealing Black Slate Floor Tiles
This process took most of the day so we left the floor to dry overnight and came back the next day to seal it using Tile Doctor Seal and Go, a highly recommended sealer for Slate which provides good stain protection with a low sheen finish, slate is quite porous and it took five coats before it was fully sealed.
Big improvement, you restored those slate tiles back to their original condition.