Floor Waxing Calculator

Floor Waxing Calculator for stripping and refinishing VCT, vinyl and terrazzo. It turns floor area and coats into finish gallons, stripper to mix, crew labor hours and a job price.

What the Floor Waxing Calculator Plans for a Job

The Floor Waxing Calculator sizes a strip and wax job on VCT, sheet vinyl, terrazzo and sealed concrete. It returns the gallons of floor finish to order, the stripper concentrate at your mix, and the labor hours that sit behind a quote.

Building service contractors and custodial supervisors use it to price a bid. Facility managers use it to budget summer floor work, where some areas get a full strip and others only a scrub and recoat.

Strip and Refinish or Scrub and Recoat

Strip and Refinish removes the old finish down to the tile, rinses the floor, then lays down fresh coats. Scrub and Recoat only cuts into the top layers with a scrub pad and adds a couple of coats, so it needs no stripper and far less labor.

Hillyard's renovation planning example strips one quarter of a building each year and scrubs and recoats the other three quarters. It puts 5 coats down after a strip and 2 on a recoat, and the calculator follows the same counts for Explorer.

On a recoat, the second result card shows the labor hours you save against a full strip of the same floor. It also shows the finish or stripper that strip would have used, so both jobs can be quoted side by side.

Floor Finish Gallons From Coverage and Coats

Floor finish is rated by coverage per gallon for one coat. The tool multiplies area by coats, divides by the midpoint of the maker's range, and then adds your waste allowance.

$$V=\frac{A\times n}{C}\times \left(1+\frac{w}{100}\right)$$

V is gallons, A is open floor area in square feet, n is coats, C is coverage in sq ft per gallon, and w is waste in percent. A 2,000 sq ft corridor with 5 coats of Hillyard Explorer at 1,750 sq ft per gallon and 5 percent waste comes to 6.0 gallons, which is one 5 gallon box plus a single gallon.

Hillyard's own planning runs tighter than its label. The example above orders 350 gallons of Explorer for 5 coats on 100,000 sq ft, which works out to about 1,430 sq ft per gallon, so bidding at 1,500 instead of the midpoint gives 7.0 gallons for the same corridor.

Measure only the open floor that takes finish. Space under fixed casework, carpet runs and entry mats does not count, and adding it inflates both the finish order and the labor hours.

Stripper Concentrate at Your Mix

Stripper labels give a ratio such as 1:10, meaning one part concentrate to ten parts water. The calculator first finds how much mixed solution the floor needs, then works out the concentrate inside it.

$$S_c=\frac{S_m}{1+X}$$

S_c is gallons of concentrate, S_m is gallons of mixed solution, and X is the water side of the ratio. A common slip is reading 1:10 as one part in ten total, which divides by 10 instead of 11 and overbuys concentrate by about 10 percent.

How far mixed stripper spreads depends on the product label and on how many old layers sit on the floor. Hillyard's example assumes 10 layers of finish to remove, so check your stripper's own label rate against the floor in front of you before ordering.

Labor Hours From ISSA Production Rates

ISSA publishes cleaning times as the square feet one worker covers per hour for each task and machine. ISSA explains the method as floor area divided by the production rate, added up for every step of the job.

$$H=\frac{A}{R_s}+n\times \frac{A}{R_a}$$

H is labor hours, R_s is the stripping or top scrub rate, and R_a is the finish application rate, all in sq ft per hour. ISSA's times list machine stripping with wet pickup at 1,333 sq ft per hour on a 20 in 350 rpm machine and 1,136 on a 17 in, and the tool applies finish at 2,000 sq ft per hour with a flat mop.

The applicator rates match the labor in Hillyard's example, where 5 coats on 100,000 sq ft take 250 hours by flat mop and 63 hours with a Multi-Flo applicator. That is why switching the applicator moves the labor card far more than switching the finish does.

Time on site is a separate number from labor hours. A bigger crew splits each step, but coats still have to dry, so the default 2,000 sq ft job shows 6.5 labor hours and 5 hours 15 minutes on site with a crew of two.

The tool accepts floor areas above zero, 1 to 12 whole coats, a waste allowance from 0 to 100 percent and a markup from 0 to 500 percent. A custom finish takes 100 to 10,000 sq ft per gallon and a dry time up to 72 hours, and any entry outside those limits pauses the results and highlights the field.

Hillyard and Bona Finish Data in the Tool

These figures come from the makers' current product listings. Coverage is per coat on a clean, stripped or scrubbed floor.

Solids decide how much film each coat leaves behind. Hillyard sells Explorer as a 25 percent solids finish that needs fewer coats, because at the same spread rate it lays down more film than a 20 or 22 percent product.

Bona's polish is a home maintenance coat for vinyl, tile, stone and laminate, reapplied every few months after cleaning. At 500 sq ft per 32 oz bottle it works out to 2,000 sq ft per gallon, and the calculator rounds it to whole bottles rather than gallons.

Wood Floors Need a Different Plan

Pick Wood in the Floor Waxing Calculator and it returns a warning rather than a job plan. Acrylic floor finish is made for resilient and stone floors, and Brett Miller of the National Wood Flooring Association writes that wood floor finishes will not adhere to acrylic polish.

He adds that the polish works into cracks and pores and is hard, often impossible, to remove fully. A wood floor that has been polished this way may need a full sanding before it can take a new coat of finish.

For a polyurethane floor that has gone dull, a screen and recoat sized with the Varnish Coverage Calculator is the usual route. Older floors kept with paste wax are a separate job, and the Floor Waxing Calculator sizes that.

Strip and Wax Questions From Crews

How much floor finish do I need per 1,000 sq ft?

At Hillyard's rated 1,500 to 2,000 sq ft per gallon, one coat on 1,000 sq ft takes 0.5 to 0.67 gallons. Five coats after a strip take 2.5 to 3.3 gallons before any waste.

Hillyard's own planning example lands a little above the high figure, at about 3.5 gallons per 1,000 sq ft for 5 coats. Rounding up to whole gallons is safer than ordering the bare minimum from the label range.

How long should floor finish dry between coats?

Hillyard lists about 1 hour of dry time for Explorer, North Star and Satin. The timeline table subtracts the time the crew spends mopping the rest of the floor, so on a large area the wait before the next coat can shrink to nothing.

Cool or humid rooms dry more slowly than the label figure. Check the first section coated before starting the next coat, and set a longer dry time with the Custom Finish option if the room runs cold. For clear wood finishes, recoat windows are covered in the Finish Drying Time Calculator.

How often should a floor be stripped?

Hillyard's planning example strips each area once every four years and scrubs and recoats it in the three years between. Rotating one quarter of the building per year keeps the stripping budget level and stretches the working life of the finish.

The Scrub and Recoat mode prices those in-between years. It adds 2 coats of Explorer after a top scrub with a floor machine at 1,754 sq ft per hour or a 20 in auto scrubber at 4,478, the rates behind Hillyard's example.

Does a bigger crew make the job cheaper?

A bigger crew does not lower labor hours, because every square foot still gets stripped once and mopped once per coat. The wage bill on the price card stays the same whether two people or six do the work.

What a bigger crew changes is time on site. That matters when a school or store gives you a single night, though drying time between coats puts a floor under how short the job can get.