Restaurants tile cleaning.

Who services these, What are obstacles on cleaning this environment? What is the cleaning schedule? What are things to consider when pricing estimates? Any other thing that may be use full to know about this topic would help.

Any takers?

We clean restaurant/commercial kitchen grout, but we charge high, because it is pretty much always an extreme restorative grease removal job. I mean, one job, i payed a kid to scrape with a screwdriver for like 7 hours. We carry screwdrivers (and a file for re flattening them). It sounds crude, but is it not crude to let petrified grease sit in your grout for 15 years? The profit margin comes when we get the repeat followup gigs for every 6 mo.

Great input Noah. Congrats on the first post, and welcome to The Lounge.

No grease joints, but lots of stores with bathrooms in the cafe areas. Be it urine or heavy grease in those grout lines, a grout saw is your best weapon.

And charge high...it will take longer than you would expect.

I hardly clean tile & grout cause I charge $ 1 / sq ft and will not give discount unless they have more than 500 sq ft, most customers say "oh ok, I'll call you back" lol, tile is a pita, our productivity drops like crazy when cleaning t & g, I wonder how much square footage can be done with t & g spinner, anyone care to share some numbers ?
Welcome to the forum Noah, where are you located and how long have you been cleaning ?

So true Dp, they are a pita.

I recently bid on the bathrooms at my Zoo which haven't been cleaned in ages. Many are not even ventilated and the urine odors are horrible this time of year.

I thought I was bidding on about 30 bathrooms....turned out to be 300!! I am actually hoping they don't accept the bid.

On a grease pit...probably take twice what a carpet would take.

dp1 wrote:I hardly clean tile & grout cause I charge $ 1 / sq ft and will not give discount unless they have more than 500 sq ft, most customers say "oh ok, I'll call you back" lol, tile is a pita, our productivity drops like crazy when cleaning t & g, I wonder how much square footage can be done with t & g spinner, anyone care to share some numbers ?
Welcome to the forum Noah, where are you located and how long have you been cleaning ?

The tile spinner will at least double your production time especially if u can maintain super high heat because u hardly need to pre scrub.  U can do about 700 square foot an hour in normal conditions. But even in this gas station I do where they don't mop for 2 to 3 months then I come in I can still do the job in under and hour and a half even with slurpee coffee grounds mustard road grease pine needles etc. If u can do 800 psi and over 220 u will fly with a spinner no matter how gross.
Even at 600 psi and Luke warm water with a spinner u can peel grime in no time.
Bathrooms I can do in about an hour to and hour and a half including shower and mini spinner and grout saw for the rocked on calcium in the shower by the drain.
commercial is usually easier because of the black grout and not having to worry about light colored residential grout that the installer didn't mix evenly.. With that being said u will want to pre qualify with a by hand demo in residential with a spray bottle a red white and blue tile brush and a white towel will usually land u the job even before giving the what u deserve price tag.

I say, with tile/stone, As always TEST before quoting!  So you know what kind of Grease hell you're gettin' yourself into, so there's no surprises when you go out to do the job.......things to look for are wax or some type of coating on the floor, what it's going to take to get it clean (chems, acid or Alk, screwdrivers lol, grout saws, putty knives, razor blades, explosives HA!, etc, and of course to get an idea ho how long it will take to do the job.

Another thing to be aware of is grout joint and tile size so you know just how much nasty grout ur dealing with.......big diff between 4" and 12" tiles.  Also what type of grout is it?...a lot of restaurants have Epoxy grout.

If you don't test first, a lot of times you get surprised and short yourself, and that's never good.

Personally I'd likely quote high and walk if they don't want to pay, because it's prob a nasty time consuming job, that has to be done in the middle of the night/morn.  I'd say $1.50-$2 a s.f. if it's at least 500 s.f., and even more if it's a small job and less sq footage.

dp1 wrote:I hardly clean tile & grout cause I charge $ 1 / sq ft and will not give discount unless they have more than 500 sq ft, most customers say "oh ok, I'll call you back" lol, tile is a pita, our productivity drops like crazy when cleaning t & g, I wonder how much square footage can be done with t & g spinner, anyone care to share some numbers ?
Welcome to the forum Noah, where are you located and how long have you been cleaning ?

I wonder why you say it's a "PITA", and your production drops?........sure, it 'can' take longer per s.f. than cleaning carpet, but you are also getting 2-3X the money to do it..........what are you using for rinsing/extraction?

I do a lot of TnG/Stone cleaning for $1-$1.20 a s.f., and seal grout on most jobs I clean, usually for another .65-.95 cents a s.f., and I would think up there you could too?

There's good money it it, so I'm willing to take the time to do it.

I think 1$ per sq ft is kinda low when you consider small downstairs bathrooms in homes. Ill do 1$ for sure but it has to be a minimum of 100sq ft or its not really worth it to pull out all the gear.

We dont mess with commercial tile, not really interested in doing nasty bathrooms etc.. or grease pits. If someone asks I just quote really high.

But then again, we really dont do much commercial in general because companies around here pay the restaurant to clean it for them, these guys are willing to work 4-5hrs in the middle of the night for 100 bucks.

Doing tile in nice residential homes is pretty enjoyable and you can make really good money. We spray, crb scrub, then spinner at 1000 psi most ceramic tile. Really liking this unitex stuff.

dp1 wrote:I hardly clean tile & grout cause I charge $ 1 / sq ft and will not give discount unless they have more than 500 sq ft, most customers say "oh ok, I'll call you back" lol, tile is a pita, our productivity drops like crazy when cleaning t & g, I wonder how much square footage can be done with t & g spinner, anyone care to share some numbers ?
Welcome to the forum Noah, where are you located and how long have you been cleaning ?

Thanks guys. I am in southern Oregon.... my 3rd yr of business. My brother and a couple friends work for me.   SpectrumCleanOregon.com

I have a nice gig at my local Denny's where we clean 1/10 of the t&g each monthly carpet cleaning... so every 10mo we cover everything, and it only adds a few minutes to the gig.

I ran into some calcified urine that I had to dye to make it look clean... sounds like I need to research a grout saw 

I was part of the rc cafe, but it's been too long. I like the frank help here. It's just that I have a lot on my plate sometimes...most of the time  This site is a little cumbersome for me to navigate, but much improved since my last visit.

Has anyone wasted $ on the Hydroforce/Injectimate grout sealing kit? It is a joke. A good idea, but only halfway invented. Besides leaking like a sieve at the top, the little brush heads are not connected intelligently to the tube. Lastly, there is no metering orifice; it just craps out a load of sealer. I am gonna buy the pumpsprayer kit that Mo just posted on the Equipment page. It is what I thought the other kit was supposed to be  

Peace all, -Noah

Noah Witt wrote:We clean restaurant/commercial kitchen grout, but we charge high, because it is pretty much always an extreme restorative grease removal job. I mean, one job, i payed a kid to scrape with a screwdriver for like 7 hours. We carry screwdrivers (and a file for re flattening them). It sounds crude, but is it not crude to let petrified grease sit in your grout for 15 years? The profit margin comes when we get the repeat followup gigs for every 6 mo.

Ya we use a spinner. I got a Hf 12" spinner from ebay. But the screwdriver gangbangers are for when the grease comes up like cat turds. Evil. I ain't waitin for any cleaning product to emulsify that stuff.   

Is the WP spinner a ton different than a Hydroforce? My sx12 seems fine to me..

I think the sx12 is prob the better spinner out there.     We have a mytee and it gets the job done,   but you have to keep the vac relief open or it will completely seal to the floor and pull the spinner bar down with it, the jets can hit the tile from this.     Recovery is really good even with relief open all the way.