Floors may look passive but if they are ignored their financial bite will soon change attitudes because they affect costs in so many ways. Slips and trips, for example, account for more than 40% of workplace accidents, totalling some £512 million and responsible for the loss of 1.3 million working days every year. To that must be added other accident costs involving the interaction of people and moving trucks which have a floor involvement. If warehouse operators, for example, rely on nothing more than mops and buckets to clean floors then forklifts could skid on them while floors are still wet, colliding with personnel and pallet racking. Any sizeable warehouse should consider using scrubber/drier machines that leave floors instantly dry after each pass and they are vastly more productive than mops and buckets. Such machine buyers today are spoilt for choice over the wide range of pedestrian/ride on cleaners tailor-made to cope with awkward corners and tight spots, and for those floors with deeply-embedded soiling by oils, etc, there are scarifiers for the most stubborn of contaminated surfaces.
Warehouse operators are under a legal duty to keep their warehouses safe and an integral part of that is the use of signage and floor line markings to separate pedestrians from trucks. Floor marking may seem a straightforward task but, in fact, it is more complicated than it seems and often leads to some form of compromise. The key elements that affect the decision-making process are money, time, disruption to operations and durability and so the final choice is usually a compromise. Some customers, for example, are too busy to wait for the materials to cure, but the flip side of that is compromised durability. For the preparation stage the main solutions are unprepared line marking, acid etching, scabbling, vacuum shot blasting, floor grinding and diamond floor shaving. The choice of paint material to finish off these preparations will be influenced by durability and curing times and its impact on the operations. A good choice for internal line marking on a prepared floor surface is a two-part high build, solvent-free epoxy resin which cures to 100% solid in 24 hours at 15 C.
Poorly maintained floors can also play havoc with forklift maintenance costs owing to damaged floor joints and potholes, and there is the additional problem of driver injuries caused by constant jarring. Floor flatness can be another major problem, leading to collisions between trucks and racking. In serious cases floor dishing caused by subsidence over poor sub soil conditions may require pile driving but fortunately there is a much cheaper, less disruptive solution for many such cases, like Uretek’s foam injection technique that fills any voids beneath the warehouse slab. Great care, however, is needed when choosing a floor grinding specialist for VNA warehouses. It seems very few flooring contractors can demonstrate a full understanding and proficiency in VNA floor grinding.
If starting from a new-build warehouse then the user should realise that floor joints are the greatest cause of problems in a modern warehouse and therefore significant savings can be made by reducing the number of joints across the whole floor. Warehouse users, therefore, might wish to ponder using ‘jointless’ steel fibre reinforced concrete floor slabs which contain no sawn-induced joints. Only metal armoured joints with heavy duty load transfer systems are installed at the perimeter of each day’s pour.
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