Winter Maintenance Guide for Your Hardwood Floors
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Winter maintenance is something that most Canadians know as a part of life in Canada. We bring out our winter clothes, put on winter tires, and get the snow equipment ready. Winter also means winter maintenance for our homes. But some people may not be aware that your hardwood floors also need winter maintenance. So, this is your guide to winter maintenance for your hardwood floors. Following these steps will help protect the longevity of your floors for many years to come.
1- Keep Temperatures Constant
One of the most important aspects of proper maintenance of hardwood floors is the environmental temperature. It is recommended that you keep your home at or around 20 degrees centigrade all year round.
Hardwood flooring will react to the ambient temperature and will expand and contract with the addition or removal of heat to the ambient atmosphere. In the summer the planks will expand more and in the winter, your hardwood floors will react to the cold by contracting.
Solid hardwood floors are most susceptible to these changes to their structure, as all the grain runs in the same direction, allowing the whole plank to expand or contract, which will then cause issues like shrinkage and gaps between the boards in solid hardwood floors.
The same issue can happen with engineered hardwood floors, especially clic (floating) engineered hardwood floors. In condos or basements with floating floors, you can often see gaps appearing between boards in the winter months, especially if portions of the flooring has been pinned by heavy furniture, and the whole floor cannot move together as they contract. Ensuring a constant temperature in the winter will help minimize this issue.
Maintaining proper temperature levels are the most important for Snow Birds. If you are leaving your home for a few months, then ensuring that you leave your home at around 20 degrees all season will make sure that you come home to floors that look great. If temperature levels fall for too long of a period, the structure of hardwood floors will be compromised. This will happen both in solids and in engineered hardwood, with the latter being at risk for delamination due to a combination of colder air and low humidity levels.
2- Maintaining Humidity Levels
Along with the heat, we need to watch the humidity levels of the ambient atmosphere in our homes. We all know that winter months are drier than summer months. We all feel it in our own bodies. We have drier skin, and our hair can get more damaged in the winter months. This is also true for our hardwood floors. There are a couple of factors that will contribute to the dryness of the hardwood floors in the winter months.
The natural drop in humidity in the winter months will mean that the hardwood floors will lose their internal moisture to the ambient atmosphere around them. This is exacerbated by the warm air from the HVAC units running across the surface of your floors. While the heat is good for the flooring, the extra dryness can cause issues for both solid hardwood floors and Engineered hardwood floors.
Solid hardwood floors can react to low humidity levels with dry cupping which means the boards shrink widthwise and rise in the centre of the plank height wise. Once solid hardwood cups, it may fix itself by adding moisture back to the boards in the long run, but the floors may take a wavy finish to them that will not fully flatten back into place.
In case of engineered hardwood, if dry cupping occurs, it generally means you will have to replace the floors as it often also causes issues with delamination of the wear layer from the core. This is not an issue that can be fixed with reintroduction of moisture into the boards.
Therefore, in cases of both solid hardwood flooring and engineered hardwood flooring, prevention of cupping is part of the best practices for maintaining your flooring. Also both low temperature and low humidity levels are issues that will void manufacturer warranties.
For your specific hardwood floor brands, you can consult the manufacturer warranty documents for the levels of humidity that they want you to maintain. As a general rule of thumb, 35% is the magic number when it comes to hardwood floors. Solid hardwood flooring and Engineered hardwood flooring tends to fail at humidity levels below 35%.
Please ensure that you have a good humidifier attached to your air conditioning units. It is also important that you measure the levels of humidity at each level of the home and to measure it at the level of your floors and not at the countertop level.
If you don’t have a humidifier included in the air conditioning unit, or if you just want to add moisture to your home on top of a humidifier, you can use portable humidifiers. You can also add to your home’s overall humidity levels through normal everyday activities. For example, activities such as cooking and bathing can add moisture to your home.
In small spaces, leaving the pot lids off when you boil water, or leaving the bathroom door open when you shower, can help add moisture to your home’s atmosphere. Alternatively, you can leave a bowl of water on a countertop and allow that to evaporate into the air as necessary.
It cannot be stressed enough that moisture levels are critical to the proper maintenance of your hardwood floors. Having proper hydrometers at the floor level around your home will allow you to monitor the relative humidity levels at your floor level and ensure the health of your floors during the winter season.
3 - Proper and Regular Cleaning
The winter months bring about a change to the world around us, in the form of sand and salt on the roads. We will bring the same sand and salt home with us on a daily basis. If you wear shoes inside your home, you transfer these onto the surface of your flooring, which can cause a couple of different issues for your floors if they are not cleaning up regularly and properly.
The first issue with sand and salt is that both of these substances are considered abrasive substances and can scratch the finish of your floors and it can create indentations on the surface of the floors when pressed down under foot. Scratching the finish off your hardwood floors, whether solid hardwood flooring or engineered hardwood flooring, will leave the actual wood exposed to moisture such as wet boots, or spills onto the surface. Over exposure to moisture can compromise the structural integrity of your hardwood flooring, and also cause the erosion of the finish of the hardwood floors making them more vulnerable to moisture issues.
Regular vacuuming of the floors will make it easier to remove these abrasive pieces from the surface of the hardwood flooring and elongate the lifespan of your floors. Dry dusting with a microfiber mop head thrown into a dryer for a few minutes so that it becomes staticky, is a great way of removing any left over sand and salt from the surface of your hardwood floors.
Be careful not to use excess water when cleaning your hardwood surfaces. It is never a good idea to wet mop your hardwood floors as the moisture can penetrate below the finished surface and cause issues with the structure of the hardwood.
To clean your wood floors, you can use a hardwood floor cleaner and a microfiber mop top. Never wet the surface of your floors, but rather spray the head of your mop with the cleaner and run the moist head onto the surface of the floors. If the mop head was too wet, it is good to have a double sided mop head that remains dry on one side to dry any extra wetness from the surface of your floors as you clean. You want your floors to dry almost immediately after the application of the cleaner onto the surface.
There are many brands of hardwood floor cleaners that are safe to use. Most manufacturers will have floor cleaners readily available for you to purchase directly from them or from their retailers. Alternatively using brands such as Bona and Finitec will also be safe. Both companies make hardwood floor finishes and therefore their cleaners tend to be safe for the surfaces treated with the finish they also produce.
Avoid Swiffer (both wet and dry) and polishes such as orange glow and Murphy’s oil. Although these products can clean your floors and sometimes shine them for a short period of time, all of these products contain a wax or other components that will adhere to the finish of your floors and dull your finish in the long run. The only way to remove this wax film will be to resurface your floors which is both inconvenient and costly and may not even be possible in some instances.
4- Party Considerations
With the arrival of the winter season comes the holiday season and holiday parties. Although holiday parties will help us feel rejuvenated and fill our love cup, they can be really hard on your hardwood floors, both solid hardwood and engineered hardwood.
The first issue with holiday parties is that your floors can be dented under the weight of shoes, especially stiletto shoes. High heels in general put more pressure on the ground below them then the same weight being applied on a flat surface. This is compounded as the heel becomes thinner and more concentrated. When standing in stiletto shoes, a woman can put 1000 pounds of pressure per inch onto the surface they are standing on. Combine that with a damaged sole that has the plastic nib worn off, and nails are exposed. These heels will create indentations and scratches on any surface including your hardwood floors.
Another issue around parties is the use of furniture. Since we tend to get more excited and excitable during the holiday season, we can be more aggressive with our furniture movements. It is even more critical in these moments to ensure that your furniture has the proper protections to make sure they don’t create indentations and scratches on the surface of your floors.
Decorations can also cause issues with abrasion and indentation. Heavy decorations falling onto the surface of the floors will create indentations, smaller fragile items such as glass decorations and ceramics, if broken, can create indentations and scratches to your surface as well.
One last issue will be stains from spilled food and drinks. Although many finishes these days claim to be impermeable and won’t allow for staining agents such as tomato sauce and red wine get through the surface finish to stain the wood underneath, these spills, if not cleaned up quickly can not only stain your surface finish, but sticky items such as wine can adhere themselves to your flooring finish and dull the finish locally. The only way to remedy this issue should it arise will be refinishing the floors and re-staining them.
Therefore cleaning up spilled food and drink as soon as possible, whether during party season or in regular times, ensures that you extend the longevity of your hardwood floors for years to come.
Also covering the surface of your floors with area rugs and carpeting during the winter and holiday season, can not only warm up your space a bit more, but it can also protect your wood floors from excessive damage from wear and tear and spills.
5- Watch the Salt!
We already talked about salt as an abrasive agent on the surface of the hardwood floors. However, unlike sand, salt on hardwood floors can pose other issues such as staining and drying up the floors excessively and rapidly.
Salt on the surface of the wood can wick moisture from the core of the hardwood floors, drying out the planks and causing them to cup in case of solid hardwood and delamination issues with engineered hardwood floors. We discussed cupping issues earlier in this article under humidity maintenance.
In addition to drying out floors, salt can stain your flooring finish and dull it. Therefore, it is really important that wet boot marks are cleaned up as soon as possible since the salt content in it can adhere to your finish and removing the stain can prove difficult later on.
We have already discussed good cleaning techniques for hardwood floors. So, I will not repeat the recommendations here. However, other than cleaning any salt or wet boot marks from your floors, you can also consider using salt alternatives to de-ice your patios and driveways. This will minimize exposure of your floors to the salt, requiring less maintenance and worry.
You can also ensure that there is a doormat with a plastic base to catch the wetness of boots and winter shoes upon entry. We already discussed the benefits of carpeting and area rugs during the winter season. Covering the wood surface with carpeting will also provide extra protection against salt abrasions and staining.
As we enter into the winter season, I hope this article equips you with the best practices to keeping your floors and home protected from the harshness of the season. We want to take this opportunity to wish you a great winter and holiday season ahead.