Cleaning Tile vs Regrouting It

The Short Answer

Dirty Grout Gets Cleaned, Broken Grout Gets Regrouted

If the joint is hard and smooth and the problem is color, the answer is cleaning and sealing. If the joint is powdery, cracked, or missing, the answer is a regrout. No amount of scrubbing brings back a joint that has crumbled away, because there is no grout left in there to clean.

What Cleaning Does

What Cleaning Actually Removes

Most grout that people want gone was never dirty. Standard cement grout is porous, so it soaks up water, soap scum, grease, and whatever else is in the room, and what comes back out later is the soil that got in years ago. Mopping does not reach it, because the soil is inside the joint rather than on top of it.

The Three Parts Of A Cleaning Job

A real cleaning job has three parts. An alkaline cleaner loosens the soil so it stops clinging to the grout. Agitation works it loose. Extraction pulls the dirty water back out of the joint instead of letting it settle back in. Skip the extraction and you have loosened the dirt and left it in the grout, which is why some floors look worse after a cleaning than they did before it.

The Soil A Cleaning Job Removes

• Soap scum and grease in a kitchen backsplash joint
• Soiling in a shower joint that is still hard underneath
• The dark color that cement grout takes on over years of use
• The haze and the film on the tile itself

What Cleaning Does Not Do

What Cleaning Cannot Fix

• A joint that has crumbled. If a wet fingertip comes away with gray powder, there is nothing left in the joint to clean.
• A joint that is cracked from top to bottom, especially in a straight line, which points at movement in the wall behind it.
• Grout that has been etched by water over many years, which turns the surface to dust no matter how long you scrub.
• A missing grout line, which leaves the tile edges exposed and lets water behind the tile.
• Water that is already behind the wall. Cleaning the surface does nothing about the source, and the grout goes dark again.
• Silicone that has failed at a tub or a corner. That joint gets rebuilt with silicone, not cleaned.

There is a middle option worth knowing about. If the grout is sound but stained too deep to clean out, a pigmented color sealer sits on the surface of the joint, evens out the color, and blocks the stains that come back. It takes less time and less material than pulling the grout out. We tell you honestly which one your floor needs, and if the answer is a regrout, we say that too.

How to Tell

How to Tell Which One Your Bathroom Needs

1. 1.Scrub a joint wet with a stiff brush and look at the water. Color coming off that was not there before means the soil is on the surface and cleaning will work.
2. 2.Run a wet fingertip along the joint and then look at your finger. Gray powder on the fingertip means the grout is breaking down, and cleaning is not going to fix it.
3. 3.Look for cracks. A crack in a straight line across the joint means the wall behind the tile is moving and needs to be looked at. Small scattered pits mean the grout is just worn out.
4. 4.Find a missing spot, if there is one, and look at the edge of the tile. If the tile edge is clean and sharp, the joint was ground down and the water got in behind the tile.
5. 5.Check the floor of the shower separately. A floor joint that is soft, or a floor that feels spongy near the drain, is a floor problem and not a cleaning problem.
6. 6.Look at the ceiling in the room below. A water stain there means the shower has been leaking and no amount of cleaning changes that.

The Warning

The Acid and Bleach Warning, Which Is Worth Reading Twice

Do not mix bleach with anything acidic. Vinegar, lemon juice, some acidic bathroom descalers, and a number of grout cleaners are all acidic. Bleach plus an acid can release a toxic gas, and in a small bathroom with the door closed that gas has nowhere to go. This is the one homeowner mistake on this page that can hurt somebody.

Use One Product At A Time

Use one product at a time. Rinse the surface properly between products. Open the window or run the fan. Read the label, because many grout cleaners are alkaline for exactly this reason, and alkaline cleaners are the ones that work on cement grout.

What Acid Does To Grout And Stone

Acid also does damage. It etches the surface of natural stone, it dulls some glazes, and it eats into the grout itself, which is why an acid cleaner used repeatedly leaves you with wider joints than you started with. On a marble or a slate floor, acidic products are the wrong choice regardless of how good the grout looks.

Sealing Comes With Its Own Rules

On the sealing side, the grout has to be bone dry before sealer goes on. Sealing over dirty or damp grout locks the stain in, and that is the one mistake we see on jobs that were done by somebody else. On a floor or a backsplash we use a penetrating sealer that soaks in and lets moisture vapour out. In a shower, where grout sits in standing water, we use a sealer rated for wet areas. If your grout is epoxy, it is not porous and it does not need sealer at all.

What to Do Next

What to Do Next

Do the wet finger test on a joint in the shower and one on the floor. That takes a minute and it splits the question in half, so you know whether you need a cleaning service or a regrout. Then get the area measured, because a cleaning or sealing job is priced by the square foot and it should not be guessed from the doorway.

What The Estimate Tells You

On the estimate we tell you which of the three jobs it is: cleaning, color sealing, or a regrout. We write down the area, the product we are going to use on your type of grout and your type of tile, and what happens if the grout turns out to be worse than the surface suggested.