Creating a Winter Floor Mat Plan
- December 04, 2018
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- NorthStar Mat Services
Winter is coming. Do you have the right commercial entrance mats to combat the challenges that come with the season? We’ve got some helpful tips for creating a comprehensive and effective winter floor mat plan for your facility!
The first step to an effective floor matting plan for the season is to understand what you are up against. In the winter time, the absence of dust is replaced with slush and melted snow that leaves your floors terribly dirty, muddy, slippery and accident-prone. Worse, the salt that keeps the roads and sidewalks safe can eat away at floor surfaces and create irreparable damage when tracked indoors.
Winter Commercial Entrance Mats Plan
It is likewise important to understand that a single entrance mat cannot do the job of protecting your entire business space. It takes a combination of carefully-placed commercial entrance mats amongst other important factors to completely prevent any of these things from getting into contact with your bare floors. Here are the essentials:
Outdoor commercial entrance mats. Outdoor mats are your floor’s first line of defense against the distressing winter sludge. Choose sturdy, made-for-the-outdoors mats that have scrapers on their surfaces. These abrasives will peel the first layers of dirt and moisture from the undersides of your shoes.
Scraper entrance mats. Your second level of floor protection comes in the form of indoor scraper mats. Like your outdoor commercial entrance mats, these have specialized abrasive surfaces to take care of the rest of the snow, ice and mud.
Cotton action wiper mats. Wiper mats take care of the excess moisture left behind on your customers’ shoes that the first two mats may not have completely removed. This makes sure that no amount of debris and /or moisture dragged in from the outdoors ends up on your bare floors.
Winter Commercial Entrance Mats Plan: The Other Things to Consider
Aside from the types of mats that you need for your winter floor mat plan, there are a couple of other factors you need to consider before carrying implementing your floor mat system. Here are three of them:
Placement. The foremost consideration in your floor mat plan execution is the location of your floor mats. Ideally, at every entrance, make sure that all three layers of floor mats are in place. This makes sure that the problem is taken care of right at the entrance. It is also important to provide additional mats where there is an expected higher volume of foot traffic for best coverage.
Size of mats. It is likewise important to get your entrance mat in the right size. While the numbers vary from one commercial facility to another, other factors you should consider include weather, actual foot traffic volume, and the use of trolleys and mechanized carriers. A good rule of thumb for winter season mat coverage is between 25 to 30 feet of matting to get an impressive 90% of coverage.
Quality of Mats. Perhaps the most important factor of all in any floor mat planning is the quality of the mats that you use. Aside from making sure that you get only mats that come with certifications from the National Floor Safety Institute (NFSI), make sure you also get mats that are durable and sourced from a credible provider – like NorthStar Mat Service!
NorthStar is a leading provider of all kinds of commercial mat rental services. All of our mats come with an NFSI certification and all our services are provided by highly-trained and -skilled experts in the industry.
Contact us today 1-800-994-9797 to get a head start on your winter floor mat planning!
