Keeping your wood floor always clean is a must to protect your family from germs and bacteria on the floor. Sweeping and mopping the floors will help the floor look great.
However, providing a safe and healthy floor for your family is not enough. Here, you need to disinfect your wood floors as well.
To disinfect wood floors, you cannot do it carelessly. In this case, you must understand what products are needed, how to it, and how often you should disinfect your wood floor. Let’s check all the explanations about disinfecting wood floors in the following explanation.
What is the Best Way to Disinfect Wood Floors?
Talking about the best disinfectant for wood flooring, you can disinfect wood floors with vinegar. As the best natural disinfectant, people have used vinegar for cleaning their wood floors for years. Please follow the steps below to get the best result in disinfecting the wood floor.
- Preparing the floor surface is a must before you start to disinfect it. You can clean it by vacuuming to remove the dirt and dust.
- Mix white vinegar and water. One gallon of water can be mixed with a half-cup of vinegar.
- Take your mop and dip it into the bucket. Don’t forget to squeeze the mop before applying it on the floor to remove the excess water.
- Wiping the wood floor out thoroughly. Make sure that all corners of the floor have been wiped well. You also must rinse the mop frequently.
- Waiting for the wood floor to dry.
If you have a large area of wood floor, you should use a steam cleaner, so your work will be faster.
How Do You Disinfect Hardwood Floors Naturally?
Besides vinegar and water, you can add other natural disinfectants to get a better result. So, here are some household ingredients that work as antibacterial wood floor cleaners.
Vegetable oil
After mixing vinegar and water, add vegetable oil, about one teaspoon, to the bucket and mix it well. Vegetable oil will help your floor be free from germs and make the wood floor shiny enough.
Washing Soda
Primarily, washing soda is used for laundry. However, you can also use it as a disinfectant agent for your wood floor. Mix washing soda, liquid dish soap, vinegar, and hot water in the bucket. Then, you can use it for mopping the wood floor.
Olive Oil
There are many benefits of olive oil, and one of them is disinfectant wood floors. Mix this oil with hot water and vinegar to get the best result. After that, you mop your wood floor regularly using this natural disinfectant.
Baking Soda
If you have baking soda, you can create a disinfectant with vinegar and water. After mixing, spray them on the wood floor, wait for about 15 minutes, brush them, and rinse them.
How to clean and disinfect wood floors with vinegar
Understanding how to mop the floors is simple, but mistakes are always made, like using a dirty mop that smells bad.
Please do not do it! A dirty mop spreads all the dirt and smells it has. Because of this, you should only use a mop, rag, or mop to clean wooden floors. Avoid them if you care about your wood floors.
If you don’t clean natural wood floors well, they can be a source of infection. Vinegar is one of the best ways to clean and disinfect wood floors.
Vinegar with water
With this easy method, dirt and grease stains come off. Vinegar that has been diluted with water is both very strong and natural. Both ingredients are the same amount, and all you have to do to get rid of a stain is pass a mop over it.
You can also eliminate the strong smell of vinegar by using vinegar made from beets, which is biodegradable and good for the environment.
Olive oil and vinegar
causes a complete clean. Aside from that, they will also make a slight polish. To do this, mix 4 tablespoons (60 ml) of olive oil, 2 tablespoons (20 ml) of white vinegar, and 2 cups (500 ml) of water (500 ml).
To put it down, we suggest putting the mixture in a sprayer and spraying the worn part from above. This will keep water from getting on the floor directly or in large amounts.
Detergent and vinegar
2 cups of water, 1 tablespoon (15 ml) of detergent, and half a cup (125 ml) of vinegar (500 ml). This mixture cleans our floors well, but it is more corrosive than the ones we’ve used.
Most of the time, we use detergent to wash dishes. This method works best for cleaning wood floors that are not too delicate.
Remember that this homemade cleaner is also acidic because vinegar is acidic; using it too often will thin the varnish. So, our main piece of advice is to use it to clean heavily soiled wooden floors and mop them every day to keep them clean.
Even though vinegar is often thought of as a natural disinfectant, it should be used as little as possible, just like bleach. Both are corrosive liquids that, over time, can damage the protective layer of the floor.
Instead of vinegar, we suggest that you use specific cleaning products that are good and won’t harm hardwood floors.
These will make sure that the formulas are the best fit for each floor and finish.
Other Products to Disinfect Wood Floor
Besides all the ingredients above, you can choose other ingredients to disinfect your wood floors. Those are hydrogen peroxide, bleach, and other disinfectant product for flooring.
Hydrogen Peroxide
Hydrogen peroxide effectively removes stains on wood floors and germs. You only need 3% hydrogen peroxide and spray it on the floor. To void the floor damage, you only wait 2 or 3 minutes before your floor is wiped.
Bleach
Bleach is a germ-killing ingredient that people can easily find in stores. Generally, it is not recommended for interior wood flooring. However, you can use it when you have no other option to disinfect the wood floor.
Bleach is not fully recommended for cleaning wooden floors and surfaces, as it is quite strong and can, among other things, discolor this material.
Mix the bleach with water and spray it through the wood floor. After that, rinse the floor after you wait about 5 minutes. If you choose bleach, ensure all ventilation is open to avoid bad effects because of the bleach smell.
Disinfectant Product for Flooring
Today, you can find many disinfectant products for the wood floor in stores. You can choose which product you like. Don’t use floor cleaners with bio alcohol.
Although they are disinfectants, they can cause loss of shine after excessive use, so they are not recommended in this time of constant cleaning. Here, you only need to follow the product’s packaging instructions.
Bona antibacterial cleaner
Does Bona wood cleaner disinfect? Use the hydrogen peroxide-based antibacterial cleaners from Bona to eliminate germs on your wood floor.
Its powerful formula will not only clean the dirt you can see, like muddy footprints and spilled food, but it will also kill 99.9% of nasty bacteria and viruses you can’t see.
The Bona Professional Hardwood Floor Cleaning Kits are great and are made for hardwood floors with a polyurethane finish.
The chemicals won’t hurt the finish, and they won’t leave anything behind.
What Don’ts in Disinfecting Wood Floor
Besides choosing the best disinfectant for wood floors, there are some don’ts you must know in disinfecting wood floors.
The first one is you are better off using less water. Too much water will make the disinfectant less effective. With too much water, you mop the floor for cleaning, not disinfecting.
Moreover, choosing a disinfectant that can cause damage to the wood floor too often is not recommended. Some ingredients, such as hydrogen peroxide and bleach, can cause damage when you sit them too long.
Lastly, you also better disinfect the wood floors once a week only. Daily disinfecting is not a good idea because it can cause damage to wood floors. Besides, somehow the smell of disinfectant is not good for health.
Final Thought
Why is keeping the wooden floor disinfected so important? When people walk over parquet or wood floors every day, bacteria get stuck to the bottoms of their shoes and spread across the floor.
Because of this, the parquet needs to be scrubbed often to keep it clean. Even more so now, even stricter rules for cleaning must be followed.
So, all of the owners of places with this kind of soil had to do more cleaning and add virus-killing products and other safety measures to make them safe.