Very economical and environmentally friendly, black soap has many possible uses, notably a great cleaning power for your home’s parquet flooring. Having enjoyed its moment of glory as the favorite cleaner for those who wish to remove stains with a powerful and natural product, we still wanted to know if black soap is really risk-free for all types of parquet flooring.
What is black soap?
Pure and in paste form, composed of a mixture of oils and crushed black olives macerated in salt and potash, black soap is a soft and oily soap that is 100% plant-based with a brown color tending towards black. Effective, economical, and inexpensive, it has quickly become an ecological and multi-purpose alternative for house cleaning. Its powerful action indeed allows for easy cleaning, degreasing, and stain removal on different surfaces such as parquet flooring with just a very small piece of black soap.
Cleaning parquet flooring with black soap
In liquid form and thus diluted in water, black soap works wonders to easily get rid of stains and allows cleaning floors like parquet without mandatory rinsing. For this, nothing could be simpler: just dilute a full glass of black soap in about 5 liters of lukewarm water, then scrub the wooden parquet all over with a couch grass brush, focusing on stains if necessary. The action of black soap sanitizes, nourishes, and makes floors shine while removing ingrained stains.
Precautions to take when cleaning parquet flooring with black soap
- Because cleaning parquet flooring with black soap is done using water, this process requires taking several precautions. Indeed, you should not clean parquet flooring with excessive water to avoid damaging the finish and risking warping the wood. If your mop is, for example, poorly wrung out, the water that flows can seep between the slats of your parquet and flow under it, which will severely damage it, deform it, and even cause it to detach from your house’s floor.
- On oiled parquet, black soap should be used sparingly, because like any form of wax or natural soap, it risks dulling and clogging the parquet’s finish if used in too high a dose. To make the right mixture, know that black soap, like any detergent, should be mixed at 2 to 5% with clear water. If your parquet is brand new, a microfiber cloth and hot water can be largely sufficient to maintain your parquet or remove a stain. Diluted black soap is, however, very useful and effective on older and dirtier parquet flooring.
- For cleaning parquet flooring, never use an all-purpose cleaning product; a parquet cleaner is, in fact, necessarily a product without harsh chemicals, without any type of bleach, and without ammonia.
In summary, using black soap to maintain your parquet flooring is risk-free if, and only if, you meticulously respect the precautions to be taken, especially regarding the dosage of the diluted substance, but also the amount of water you apply to your floor surface. You can obtain black soap in stores specializing in surface cleaning products or in supermarkets specialized in health. Liquid black soap can be the same as the one you use for skin care.
