If you’re new to using a steam mop, you might be pretty anxious to get it started up and see how it works on all of the hard surface floors in your home, but you might want to slow down! Most new steam mop users make the same mistake, and it’ll be beneficial to you to learn from our mistakes and get started the correct way.
What do I mean by this? I’m not necessarily talking about preparing your steam mop itself. Each steam mop is a little different and the way to set them up and adjust the settings is often unique, especially when you’re switching between different steam mop brands. For these kind of instructions, you should consult your user manual before getting started, where it’ll explain all the aspects of putting your steam mop together as well as getting it ready to steam mop once you’ve filled up the water tank.
What I am talking about though is actually preparing the floors themselves for steam mopping. As I said above, new owners often make simple mistakes that they just overlook due to ignorance of the product.
Preparing Your Floors As To Get The Best Steam Mop Performance Possible
The first thing you’re going to want to do is actually sweep the floors before even getting the steam mop itself heated up. You never know how long this will take you, and you don’t want your steam mop to sit there idling for too long. You might find that it takes you a lot longer than you originally thought to arrange the furniture, get around everything (especially cords and whatnot) and be totally ready to go. You should take care of this before starting primarily for two reasons.
One of those reasons is because if you just leave a lot of dirt and debris on the floor, you’re just going to be pushing it around. The more surface area with no debris or dirt on it, the more chance your steam mop is going to have to actually be working on the floor. You would most likely follow the same protocol when using a regular mop anyway, so this should be common sense for the most part.
The other reason is that you’re going to definitely go through mop heads at least twice as fast if you don’t sweep up the visible dirt before getting the steam mop out and pushing it around. You would be surprised how much dirt and grime gets built up on the mop heads without sweeping first, especially if you haven’t ever steam mopped before or you mop infrequently in general.
Use The Best Steam Mops For Tough Surfaces
Hardwood and tile floors seem to just build a film of grime over them after a long time that you can’t even see with the naked eye alone surprisingly enough. This filth will already have you going through steam mop heads a lot faster than you thought, and if you bought even the best steam mop with disposable mop heads, you’re going to be paying a fortune in new mop heads without sweeping the dirt first!
After you’ve swept up all the dirt you can see with your eyes, you should arrange the furniture in a way that it’s easy to get to everywhere without having to stop steam mopping for more than a a few seconds or so. This might seem like common sense to people who mop frequently and understand removing everything in the room will make getting the entire surface a lot easier and faster, but some might not find this self evident.
Leaving your steam mop just sitting there on for long periods of time can actually damage the mop over time, so you might want to actually take everything out of the room when you’re just getting used to trying out the steam mop for the first time. While you’re just getting used to using it, you might not really be used to get narrow spots and whatnot yet, so just practice on wide open spaces for the first time. Once you have the hang of it, you’ll be fine to do it in a room with more furniture.
