How to maintain, clean and look after your marble tiles

Marble is an extremely trendy natural stone generally used as a worktop in kitchens or as floor and wall tiles in many areas around your home, Marble is a robust but a porous natural stone.

What does porous mean?
This means that marble stones are therefore fragile to a certain degree and can stain if exposed to liquids for a long period of time. If your newly installed beloved marble stones are not cared for properly, there is a very high probability that they will lose their shine and colour. And even worse than that, scratches, stains and cracks can appear on their surface.

In this blog, we will provide you with our tips for cleaning and maintaining your marble surfaces, and we will also list the products not to be used. Enjoy the read.

Protecting your Marble Tiles
Due to Marble being a natural stone, stains and scratches can quickly occur on a worktop and your floor tiles if not looked after properly. Prevention therefore remains the best way to help avoid them and protect your tiles.

There are many ways to protect and preserve your tile's natural look, here are some tips:

Sealing: We, as well as with any experienced supplier or tiler of natural stones, will recommend a minimum 2 coats of sealing process to be applied, once before and once after grouting however, sealing your Marble tiles is a maintenance part of your tiles that should be repeated at least once a year, sometimes more frequently depending on the traffic your tiles are exposed to as well as the cleaning intervals.

Spillages: Try and avoid food, drinks and dirt exposure on your Marble tiles. If/when this occurs, you have to clean the area immediately to avoid these contaminate your stone and leaving stains.

Furniture care: We all know that there will be many types of furniture within homes. This is an area of care easily missed by marble floor owners. We recommend that protective pads are used under the feet of furniture’s like sofas, tables and chairs and TV cabinets etc. as these types of furniture’s tend to be moved around which can cause scratches on your marble floors. We also recommend placing another protective layer underneath any flower pots as dirt can quite frequently go on your floor and if unnoticed, can stain your tiles.

Cleaning products: It is always advisable to keep in mind and use specially designed materials and solvents to clean and care for your marble tiles. The use of acidic or chlorine-based cleaners that may contain, bleach, lemon or vinegar, can cause discolouration and pitting of the stone surface, hence doing more harm than good. There are specialized stone soap cleaners within the market readily available that can be used not only to clean your stones surface and restore its natural beauty.

What if I just noticed a stain?
Is it too late, is the stain already embedded? You must act as quickly as possible so that it does not become soaked into your beautiful marble tile using the recommended cleaners and materials. Please clean the area as soon as you can. If soked into the stone, then a tougher cleaner like our LTP Grimex Multi-purpose intensive cleaner may help restore it.

We recommend that you actually get in the habit of mopping your Marble tiles frequently to ensure its longevity and natural shine.

Any difference between different finishes of tiles in its care and maintenance?
Polished finish marble is less unforgiving than matt/honed tiles, scratches and stains tend to pop out and be more visible on their highly reflective surface. With honed finish marble, you can get away with this slightly more than polished finish  as stains or ghosting that may be caused by things like unnoticed water droplets or even some minor scratches can be unnoticeable however, we still recommend the same care and attention is paid to honed marble as you would do to any polished tiles.

What products shall I use?
To maintain any type of marble tile, you should have a soft cloth, sponge or microfiber mop (if it is a floor), moistening them very lightly before the cleaning process. Only use soft cotton cloths and fine soft or microfiber mobs for cleaning. It is recommended to dust off your marble floor before wet cleaning with a mop, as any uncleared dust may scratch your tiles during the mopping process. Be as careful as possible and make gentle circular movements during the cleaning. After cleaning your marble surface, rinse then dry the marble with a dry cloth.

Types of products to stay clear of and never expose your marble:
Marble tile, being a porous material, is a very sensitive natural stone that certain chemicals have highly unwanted effects on.  
To help you, below is a small list of substances to avoid to successfully maintain and not harm their fantastic appearance therefore, achieving longevity of your Marble.
•    Any acidic based products that may include lemon, vinegar or sodas bases should be avoided for cleaning.
•    Bleach - Should never be used on marble (or any natural stone for that matter)
•    Wine – Especially red wine is possibly top of the list of enemies of your marble tiles, red wine seems to be soaked up like a sponge when spilt, causing staining to occur in a very short space of time, either give up red wine or don’t pour or drink it when you are on your marble floors, real test of what you love more I guess :)

However, if any of these products fall on your marble, don't panic! Act quickly by rinsing them off with plenty of water added with a small amount of dish washing soap.

How do you remove a stubborn stain from marble?
So there is a stubborn stain on your marble and you don't know how to get rid of it?

We again recommend our specifically manufactured LTP Grimex Multi-purpose intensive cleaner however, any cleaner specially designed for cleaning natural tiles would probably achieve the same results.

Need help from a professional ?
If the previous technique did not work on the persistent stain, then the only other step that can be taken is to call a professional to avoid damaging your marble even more. They will probably advise you on the correct steps to take or come to you to help restore back their natural beauty.
We hope we could help you in understanding your Marble stone and how to achieve longevity of their amazing appearance.