April showers are in the air. Great for gardeners, but not so great for our carpets and floors when people traipse dirt and mud inside. Make sure you are ready for this mud fight, by having a good entrance matting system in place.
Mud and dirt can be very costly to a business. Not only do you have to pay for your cleaners to remove the dirt (or spend valuable time doing yourself if you don't have cleaners), you also have to fork out for replacement flooring due to your hard floors becoming damaged more quickly. In fact it is estimated that the cost to remove half a kilogram of dirt, once it has got inside a building, is a whopping £350 (Source: International Sanitary Supply Association).
With figures like that, it is clear that coming up with a solution should be high on your list of priorities, particularly when the wet weather comes along, which, let's be fair, in the UK is more often than not!
Stop mud at the door
An extremely simple and cost effective solution is to have high quality entrance mats at all of your entrances. We say high quality, because if they're not, they will do little to stop the problem and will, in actual fact, be more of a false economy in the medium to long term. An ineffective mat will have the following issues:
Cheap mats are a false economy. Don’t waste your money and buy something that works instead.
- It will not remove the mud off people's shoes
- It will not hold onto mud and will allow it to be tracked off onto surrounding floors
- It will have edging that will quickly crack, split and curl, becoming unsightly and causing a trip hazard
- It will have a pile that will quickly crush down or wear away, which soon becomes unsightly and stops performing
Of course if you buy the right mat in the first place then it will not suffer from any of the above issues and it will go on lasting you for years, even in areas which have a very high foot fall.
Sometimes you may even need more than one mat. In fact we recommend that you do in the majority of circumstances wherever possible. This is because different mat types specialise in different roles. On their own they may be good, but together as a 'matting system', they can be excellent. We've written a lot about this topic before.
So what do I need to do now?
On Mats4U, we sell the most effective entrance mats in the industry. A brand of mats called Waterhog, made in the USA. These mats have been tried and tested in the most punishing of conditions, from airports, to schools, to sports stadia. They are the ultimate mud stoppers and will go on stopping mud in such conditions for years to come. If you don't have the same amount of footfall as in a school (think hundreds of children with muddy feet going over the mats many times a day) then the mats will keep performing for a decade or longer.
This is one situation where you really do pay for what you get. Think of the £350 figure we talked about earlier. If you can stop the majority of the dirt getting into your building in the first place, you will soon realise that you will recoup the cost of a high quality mat in very little time indeed.
So, if you need no more convincing, then go ahead and buy Waterhog entrance mats here. If you have a bigger mud problem, where you'd like some individual advice, then we're happy to help as well. What's best is that our advice won't cost you a penny. Either call our helpful team on 0121 351 4444 during UK office hours, or email us at sales@mats4u.co.uk.
