Cleaning question

[Louie and me]

I live in an older home built in the late 50s and when we moved in there were grubby vinyl tiles in the laundry room. I've tried every cleaning product i can think of to brighten them up and in the end decided they were just suffering from old age so I just washed the floor and stopped worrying about it. The other day I accidentally spilt some Tide liquid detergent on the floor and left it there until I finished putting the wash in. When I started to clean it up - voila! There were pristine clean spots where the Tide had been. It doesn't seem practical to use concentrated liquid Tide to wash a floor but does anyone have any ideas what else I could use to get the tiles clean? The laudry room is about 10' by 20' so it is quite a big area.

[sirrahbed]

Have you tried plain old ammonia and a brush? It smells so awful but seems to be the best thing I know of to deep clean old tile. I also have the older tile in my laundry room - eventually we went to Lowe's & got stick down replacement tiles and now it looks new!

[Laura's Babies]

Try some dishwasher liquid. I find it makes the water soft and does a great job on cleaning and brightening things up.

[Freedom]

If you use ammonia, be sure to have proper ventilation! We don't want to read about your trip to the ER, lol.

I used GOOGLE and put in
cleaning vinyl tile floors

Lots of hits, many suggest using ammonia.

Many also suggest using WINDEX!

[Louie and me]

Thanks for the tips. A friend suggested wax remover incase the previous owners just put wax on top of grime.... Haven't tried that yet.

[Karen]

Hey, at least you now know that there's the potential for it to be clean! Let us know what you try and how it works, okay?

The cleaners a former employer used swore by Tilex for everything - sadly I am so terribly allergic to it that I had to leave the building for a while after they came the first time, and we switched what they used in our office, but that might be worth trying, too. Strong stuff!