Over time, every building starts showing the effects of age and pollution. Keeping your building looking immaculate for the sake of your business, to preserve history, or to ensure the health of your building requires proper maintenance and care; that’s why it’s crucial to choose a sensitive cleaning solution for your stone building. Doing so will keep your façade in good condition and ensure the investment lasts into the future.
Although stone is durable, it’s destructible. Failure to continuously maintain or using wrong products can lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic damage to your stone building.
Testing and evaluation
While choosing a sensitive and sympathetic cleaning solution for your building, it is always best to develop a clear understanding of the building’s history and current condition. An initial investigation identifies both structural properties and aesthetic qualities of the stone. It also gives you the opportunity to decide what sort of potential finish you would like after the clean. If your building is historic, you might want the building to keep some of its aged charms.
At Building Transformation our team considers the stone type, pointing, staining, and any other important attributes that determine the current exterior envelope’s appearance.
Choosing a sensitive cleaning solution
Delicately carved stone ornaments, distinctive tooling, and bonding patterns are the details that we most admire. However, these details also succumb to the effects of pollution and age as well as insensitive repairs, careless repointing, and inappropriate coatings.
Our team reviews the deterioration mechanism at work and prepares an appropriate program for stone restoration that can preserve the building’s architectural and cultural features. The goal is to reach your vision while ensuring any stone cleaning solution leaves the integrity of the stone intact.
Why choose steam cleaning?
Steam cleaning is quick and easy, providing powerful hot temperatures that clean the surface of the stone effortlessly. That is why we use sensitive, low-pressure stone cleaning to sensitively clean stone buildings.
While using steam, chemicals are not always needed. Every surface material, whether engineered or natural stone, has traces of minerals that are acid sensitive. It is therefore essential to know the cleaning process and the products that will best suit the restoration. We recommend steam cleaning because it is chemical-free.
However, certain chemicals work well for removing staining such as carbon, traffic film, effluence staining, leached salts, organic matter, pollution, and paint from your stone façade. Some can be applied and left to sit, followed by a steam clean. You should always test any chemicals before you apply them to a stone façade, to ensure they will provide the expected outcome and will not cause any damage.
The steam produced with an output temperature between 200-210 degrees. The combination of heat, speed, and pressure will kill allergens and prevent harmful bacteria spread. If a more abrasive clean is needed, you can investigate aggregate cleaning options. The system uses a mix of abrasive carried by a flow of compressed air where water is then added. It can help shift stubborn coatings and paint that might be causing damage or staining.
Summary
To maintain your building asset for the future you should select a chemical-free cleaning solution that will not only protect your stone building, also easy to use. Steam cleaning has proved to be the most sensitive and sympathetic cleaning solution for stone cleaning and restoration.
Reach out to our specialists with vast knowledge and experience in stone cleaning and restoration. You will acquire the best results.
