Going Under the Cover Job

Actually, the truth is that coatings on stone are bad for stone. And what’s bad for stone is bad for the industry.
So what’s really wrong with coatings? They scuff, flake, attract dust, require tons of maintenance, look plastic, create that yellow waxy buildup … the list is endless. Let’s focus on a few money reasons why not to coat your stone.
Right off the top, coatings rarely adhere well to a polished stone. For starters, there is nothing for the plastics to grab on to, as the surface is so smooth. Essentially, coatings become just a hardened sheet of plastic lying on the stone, semi-glued on.
Now when it comes to grout, we’re talking about stuff that knows how to hold on. And because grout is recessed, it just builds up coating during the strip and re-coat cycles and turns blacker and uglier with each one. Waxes become saturated into the cementous pores and will not come out, even with 1500 PSI hot water.
An added anti-benefit to the poor adhesion quality is that the wax “walks off” in the traffic lanes. This flaking requires added coats to keep up appearances, and the make-work project has just started. These products only look good for the first day or two at best, so the end users of stone are stuck in a never-ending maintenance cycle. Wax, burnish, wax, burnish, strip, re-coat, wax, burnish … the dance goes on forever.
Remember that stone is low maintenance. And what has someone done by adding coatings? Created endless work.
When janitorial companies strip these coatings – in some cases, monthly – they use aggressive chemicals, pads and/or brushes that do more damage than any amount of foot traffic could inflict in years. How is this good for the stone?
I remember being called in to restore a terrazzo installation that had been waxed for several years. The nickel bars that separated each slab were abnormally higher than the terrazzo surface. It was obvious that the strip and wax cycles had taken their toll on the poor innocent stone, but had not harmed the metal bars.
I was called another time into a large hotel to polish a section that recently had its coating stripped for our demo. The company that stripped it used high-performance stripping pads and scratched the stone to about an equivalent of a 70-grit metal-bond diamond pad, without the benefit of removing the lippage. No amount of compound was going to bring any gloss to that section. We got about 17 on the gloss meter, tops. We stripped a section next to it (gently) and were able to pull 70’s from the gloss meter.
In 1992, Fred Hueston from the National Training Center for Stone and Masonry Trades (NTC) did a study of two different maintenance programs in three different locations, comparing coatings to proper natural stone care. In all cases, the labor cost was reduced by more than half per night with proper care!
In one case (a 12,000 ft(2) hotel lobby), the nightly labor hours for care went from 16 hours down to six. That was a 10-hour saving in labor per night; if the per hour cost of labor is figured at $12, that translates into $ 43,800 of annual savings.
That is no small chunk of change – and it doesn’t even take into account the cost of waxes, strippers, pads and equipment costs needed to care for this installation over that year.
How is putting coatings down helpful to your customers? It isn’t, when you consider that it makes stone look like plastic when they paid for stone. If a customer wants a high-maintenance floor that looks like plastic, why wouldn’t they just purchase a cheap high-maintenance floor instead of an expensive one?
Customers buy stone to look like stone. If they wanted plastic, they would have bought plastic. So why are so many of the world’s beautiful, luxurious natural-stone floors suffocating under a plastic coating?
It’s because no one takes the time to explain the cons of it from day one – possibly because not many people know the cons. Few stone salespeople explain that, down the road, you will need to spend a little money restoring your floor and removing the lippage from installation.
Janitorial companies do not know any better. They’re just doing what they do everywhere else –“That hard surface floor looks dull, better put down some wax.”
Many don’t realize that polished stone is actually polished stone. They believe that it has some sort of strippable coating that can be removed with acids (a chemical reaction that actually eats the top polished layer of marble tiles). They need to receive an education in natural-stone care and get out of the coating mentality. If they do, everyone will benefit.
Part of the problem also lies with the customer. (I guess I just threw that whole Dale Carnegie theory that “the customer is always right” right out the window). When their stone first becomes worn, they face a choice:
A) wax it for pennies, or
B) remove lippage and polish for dollars.
Many times, the person making the decision is not even the one who specified the installation or currently owns the stone. They are just managers or controllers (the dreaded “bean counters”) trying to save their companies a few dollars. They look at the up-front cost of restoration and get weak in the knees.
The janitorial guy is eyeing a sure-thing regular maintenance contract, so he’s not going to tell the gatekeeper the cons of waxing. Left with this scenario, most of the check writers will yield to the temptation of waxing – not realizing that they just got married into a relationship that never ends.
Here is where the whole industry needs to be on the ball. From the quarry operators to the restoration contractors, everyone needs to let the end users know of the coating trap. Once the wax has started to flow, it’s hard for the customers to turn off the taps. Doing so means higher restoration costs; not doing anything means higher annual maintenance costs.
If our number-one sales advantage of low maintenance gets pillaged by a bunch of plastic-applying pirates, customers will start looking at alternatives to stone. I, for one, would hate to see that happen and I’m sure that any who have benefited over the recent demand for our product will feel the same way.
Spread the word: stone is low maintenance. Let’s keep it that way.
Until next time, keep your stick on the ice.
Tom McNall is founder and owner of Great Northern Stone Care, a Huron Park, Ontario-based stone-cleaning and -restoration company servicing all of southern Ontario. Tom also offers corporate and private consultation and serves as a trainer for the MIA.