"Stone floor cleaner" on a bottle does not mean your stone. The four stones we meet most in Yorkshire homes want four different things, and a product that is perfectly safe on one of them will permanently damage another.
The damage is not theoretical. A good share of the floors we are called out to were ruined by somebody looking after them carefully with the wrong product.
Four tests you can do yourself
None of these need anything you do not already have. Do them somewhere out of the way — inside a cupboard, under a rug, behind a door.
1. The water test. Put a few drops of water on the floor and wait two minutes.
- Beads and sits on top → there is a working sealer on it
- Soaks in and darkens the stone → unsealed, or the sealer has gone
- Beads in some places, soaks in elsewhere → a failing sealer. The most common result
2. The scratch test. Press a coin into the surface in a hidden spot.
- Marks easily → a soft stone: travertine, limestone, some sandstone
- Will not mark → a hard stone: granite, slate, hard sandstone
3. Look at the surface close up. Get down to it in good light.
- Small holes and pits, sometimes filled → travertine
- Fine, even, almost chalky, often with tiny fossils → limestone
- Visible grains, like compressed sand → sandstone
- Speckled, crystalline, glittery → granite
- Layered, flaky, splits in sheets → slate
4. Look at a cut edge — a doorway, a cut-out, the edge by a vent. The inside of the stone tells you more than the polished face.
What each one is, and what it hates
Travertine. A limestone formed near mineral springs, full of natural voids which are usually filled at the factory. Warm, honey-toned, very popular in conversions. The softest thing on this list. It etches on contact with anything acidic — lemon, vinegar, limescale remover, many bathroom sprays — and an etch is physical damage to the surface, not a stain. No amount of cleaning removes it.
Limestone. Turns up constantly in older Yorkshire buildings and in churches. Porous, available in a huge range of colours and textures, and genuinely lasts a lifetime if it is looked after. The same acid problem as travertine.
Sandstone. The Yorkshire stone and Indian stone you see on floors and patios all over the region. Hard and durable — though not as hard as slate or granite — and very open-pored, so it drinks whatever is spilled on it. Sealing matters more on sandstone than on almost anything else.
Granite. One of the oldest and strongest flooring materials there is, essentially scratchproof, and far less bothered by acid than the others. Even granite goes dull under a detergent film, though.
Slate, which is common in Yorkshire too, is hard and acid-tolerant but flakes at the surface as it ages, and the loose layers have to be dealt with before anything is sealed.
The short version
| Your stone | Keep away from | Biggest risk |
|---|---|---|
| Travertine | Anything acidic | Etching — permanent |
| Limestone | Anything acidic | Etching, and staining through the pores |
| Sandstone | Harsh strippers | Absorbing spills; very porous |
| Granite | Little, chemically | Detergent film dulling the surface |
| Slate | Acidic strippers | Surface flaking |
If you take one thing away: check the bottle before it touches a soft stone. If the label mentions limescale, descaler, vinegar or citrus, keep it away from travertine and limestone entirely.
Why we survey before we quote
Every job starts with a free, no-obligation visit from Rob, our fully trained floor technician. He surveys the floor properly, carries out a demonstration on a small area so you can see the result on your own floor rather than somebody else's, and talks through the finish you want.
Identifying the stone is the first thing that survey does, because everything after it depends on the answer — which cleaning system, what strength, whether the floor can be sealed and with what.
We can offer more than one system, which is unusual and is the point. One is steam combined with a counter-rotating brush: no chemicals at all, the heat and the mechanical action doing the work. That makes it genuinely environmentally friendly and safe to use where chemicals are a problem — we use it in vets, schools and hospitals. It is fast and it sanitises as it goes.
The other is the conventional route: a pre-spray chosen for your specific stone, left to dwell so it loosens what is in the pores, worked with a rotary machine, and then — the part a mop can never do — the dirty slurry rinsed away and removed rather than pushed around.
Which one suits depends on the stone, the building and what is on the floor now.
Sealing, and the measurement people skip
Once the floor is clean it can be sealed, and the finish is your choice — we will advise on what suits the stone and the traffic.
Before anything is applied we use moisture detection meters to check the floor is genuinely dry enough. This is not box-ticking. Seal a floor with moisture still in it and you trap it there, and the result is a cloudy, milky finish that has to be stripped back off. Once a seal is on, the floor can be walked on as normal after roughly two hours.
A sealer is not armour. What it does is slow down how fast a spill soaks in, and that is the whole difference between a spill you wipe up and one that is now part of the floor.
Where to go next
- Stone floor cleaning — the full service and the stones we work with
- Why your stone floor looks dull — what mop water does over the years
- Restoring Yorkshire stone floors — the regional stone in detail
- Hard floor restoration — where a floor needs repair as well as cleaning
Ask us to look
Floor Angels is a family-run firm, part of Cleaning Angels Yorkshire, and has been restoring floors across South and West Yorkshire since 2007 — Sheffield, Barnsley, Huddersfield, Holmfirth and the villages between them.
Call 0114 288 1937 or 07729 345 458, or send us a message, and we will come out, look at the floor and tell you honestly what can be done with it.
