Polished Concrete Maintenance

The routine

Day to day: a mop and a pH number

Day-to-day care for polished concrete is a dust mop; wet cleaning is a neutral-pH cleaner — pH 7, neither acidic nor alkaline — because anything stronger chemically etches the polish. The pH rule sounds fussy until you know what a polished floor actually is: ground stone hardened with a densifier, with no protective film over it. Acidic cleaners dissolve the polished surface directly — that's etching. Strong alkaline cleaners go after the densified surface and leave it hazy. Neutral cleans without picking either fight.

Never wax a polished floor: wax is a sacrificial film that dulls the gloss you paid for, then has to be stripped with exactly the aggressive chemicals polish hates.

Wax sounds like protection. On polish it's vandalism with extra steps.

The commercial schedule

Re-burnishing: gloss on a cadence

Commercial polished floors run on a re-burnish cadence — roughly every 6–12 months for high-traffic retail, every 1–2 years for warehouse aisles. A burnisher is a high-speed buffing machine — no grinding, no dust containment, usually done overnight without closing anything. It's how a grocery aisle keeps its sheen under thousands of cart passes a week, and it's a line item, not a project.

Homes mostly skip this. Residential foot traffic is gentle enough that a polished den or converted garage may go many years before anyone thinks about gloss.

The threat list

What actually kills polish

Three things, in the order we see them. Dragged pallets and steel feet — sliding hard loads scores the surface in a way no cleaner caused and no burnish fixes. Put wheels or sliders under it. Acid spills left to sit — etching is permanent chemistry, and speed is the only defense. Grit trapped under mats — the sneaky one, sanding the floor from below while the mat looks like it's helping.

And one honest admission: traffic lanes dull anyway. Traffic lanes dull over years no matter what you do, and re-polishing just the lane costs a fraction of recoating anything. Years of wheels and footsteps win eventually, in the lanes, while the rest of the floor still looks new. The fix is local and cheap — which, compared against how coatings fail, is half the argument in the polished concrete vs epoxy comparison. For floors taking real abuse daily, the heavier-duty schedule lives with our commercial polishing work.