I'm considering the Horizon for tile & grout cleaning in condo or high rise homes. Two concerns, one is foam causing blow by and effecting vac motors (even with use of defoamers), secondly some times the water flow at sink is not as much as outside spicket. Will this effect the psi constance even with a 5/8 hose? I saw one at Daves stone class and it rocked but we were only picking up slurry which is somewhat foam free. By the way that class is great and would highly recommend it.Anyway anyone have first hand knowledge using for tile & grout cleaning or if you just want to rant thats ok too.

Thanks

Wayne

Hi Wayne

Thanks for the honorable mention on the stone class – ironically enough we’ll be posting today or tomorrow our next Stone Class for the end of the second week of January.

Now back to your post; wise concern on your part with regards to blow by. We’ve had blow by issues with other high pressure porties in the past and occasionally we’ll even have it with our Horizon as well. There is a very cool option that you might consider trying. Here in town there is a store called GFS, its kind of a mini warehouse type store. The idea is that it is for food service type of business to be able to buy in bulk and save $$$ but anyone can shop there. They have there large cooking utensils as well. We once bought two large rectangular pans to use for serving trays for a large picnic we were having. They are bigger and heavier than a cookie sheet and they also have four side walls where as a cookie sheet often times only has a single end wall/lip. Now the point of this culinary reference: this pan is big enough to use as a drip tray under the machine. Another option is back in the day when we was kids it was fairly common to find people that would put large drip trays in their driveways to catch oil dripping from their cars, something like that would work as well. The nice thing about this thin baking pan is that it’s small enough not to take up any real space in the truck and yet stout enough to get knocked around a bit. If you’re like me (and to bad for you if you are, please accept my condolences) than you’re always a little nervous having water lines running into and all around a client’s house. Whenever possible we set up our porty just outside an exterior door. But one other thing you can do if you do go with a drip type pan set up; get yourself one of those handy little water detectors that scream like a banshee if they should ever come in contact with water and set it in the drip pan. That way you’ll know right away if you should have a blow by issue or if you should spring a leak inside someone’s home.

With another high pressure porty we still own but have taken out of service, it has a fresh water tank with a float shutoff. Fortunately this day we were doing some second floor work and had the machine setup outside running the pressure line and vac hose up through a window to the second floor. I set everything up, turned on the water lines and went about getting everything else ready. Just for a moment imagine the EXTREAM HORROR that came over me as I walked around the corner of the house and found fresh water billowing out, over the top of the machine. Good thing I had set up the machine outside on the day that the shutoff float decided to not shut off.

And that brings me to one of the many things I like about the Horizon; there is no fresh water tank. You run a hose to the back of the machine and that runs directly to the pump; nothing to over flow, nothing to leak.

As for water availability, we just did some stone work in the 4th floor executive lobby of a bank. Every other floor has a mop sink where we could set up our porty for auto fill and auto discharge except this one. What we have is a braided stainless steel water supply line you can get at HD or the like. At one end is a 5/8” fitting that will connect to a sink or toilet water shutoff and at the other end is a ½” fitting that we run a hose bib to with a one quarter turn valve on it. We disconnect the poly vinyl water supply line behind the toilet and connect our line to it. Then we run our fresh water hose to that and our discharge line we stuff down into the trap of the toilet. When we’re done we reconnect their line and start breaking down our equipment. The last thing we do before we leave the job is go back and make sure there are no leaks on their line.

I hope this helps, if anyone has anymore Q’s please feel free to ask.

David Gelinas
Marbleguy

David,

i guess i'll take you up on your offer.

My question is would there be a problem stipping and finishing a terrazzo floor if it has an open wound?

what i mean is someone could have dropped some heavy object or even took a sledge hammer and wacked the floor. It has a 8" crack in it and its about 1/4" wide 1/8" deep as if some one took a screw driver and scraped out the lose debri.



Thanks
Your Servant Alex

The Time Left Is Reduced!!
USE IT WISELY!!

Alex,

Dave's out of town for the weekend celebrating his anniversary - so he'll have to get back with you when he gets back,

A quick answer to your question is that damaged terrazzo can be repaired. It's a fine art of matching colored marble chips with a similarly colored portland mixture. Then the patch needs to be ground flat with the rest of the floor. That's it in a nutshell, I'm SURE that Dave can give you a beter answer when he gets back.







Rick Gelinas
rick@excellent-supply.com