Say goodbye to stubborn grime and dirt on your tiles and grout. Grout is a porous, slightly recessed line running through the middle of a hard, non-porous surface, which is a nearly perfect trap: everything that gets mopped off the tile ends up in it, and a mop pushes more in every time.
Out on the rural parcels around Palermo, Durham and the Oroville East side there is a second problem on top of the soil. Hard well water leaves mineral deposit in the grout line and on shower stone, and that is a color problem rather than a dirt problem. Scrubbing does nothing to it. It has to be dissolved out, and then the surface has to be sealed so it does not go straight back in.
How we clean it
We use high-pressure hot water combined with a cleaning agent matched to the deposit, captured by a contained extraction head so the water and the soil leave the building instead of moving to the next room. That reaches into the grout line rather than skating over it, and it works on ceramic, porcelain, travertine, slate and most natural stone.
Natural stone is treated on its own terms. Travertine and slate are softer and more absorbent than porcelain and take a gentler chemistry and lower pressure, which is a judgment made on site rather than a setting on the machine.
Sealing, and re-coloring when the stain has gone through
Cleaning without sealing buys you a few months. A penetrating sealer soaks into the grout and gives the next spill somewhere to sit while you wipe it up, instead of soaking straight in. It is the difference between doing this every year and doing it every four or five.
Where grout has stained all the way through — and gray grout that was originally white usually has — cleaning alone will not bring the color back. Grout colorant re-pigments and seals the line in one pass, and it can also change the color if you want a different one. Most grout can be recolored with no problem; the exception is grout that has previously been treated with a poor-quality colorant, or painted.
Where we work
High Tech provides tile & grout cleaning services across Butte County, California — Oroville, Chico, Paradise, Palermo, Durham, Gridley, and Biggs — and just over the county line in Marysville. See every area we serve.