Cleaning Red Wine from Grout

Written by
Life Maid Easy Team
Published on
Aug. 20, 2017

Red wine stains are one of the most difficult types of stains to remove. Wine stains can ruin clothes, fabric, furniture, and carpets. When red wine is spilled on grout it will be instantly absorbed if the grout has not been properly sealed. Even if the grout has been sealed it can still be stained if spills are allowed to sit on it for a long period of time. There are no sealers on the market today that can protect the grout from red wine that has been allowed to sit and dry on the grout.

It goes without saying that it is extremely important to seal your grout before any stains have a chance to be absorbed by the grout. Sealers will prevent spills and stains from being instantly absorbed by the porous grout. If you do spill something on grout that has been sealed then you can instantly use a paper towel or wet sponge to clean up the spill before it stains the grout. It is important to clean up and wipe away any spills that occur on sealed grout because a sealer alone is not enough to totally protect the grout from absorbing spills and stains.

If the grout has not been properly sealed and red wine is spilled on it then the grout will become stained. To remove the stain at this time requires an aggressive cleaning procedure. You should first use paper towels or a cotton towel to dab up and remove as much of the stain as possible. After this, an acidic tile cleaning product is required to remove the red wine stain. You should apply a mild urea based tile and grout cleaning solution to the grout line and let it sit there for 5-10 minutes. Acidic cleaners are required for cleaning up inorganic stains in grout from substances such as wine and mustard. After you let the acidic cleaner react with the wine stain then you should use some type of wet vac to suck out the acidic cleaner from the grout line. Sucking out the acidic cleaning solution and the red wine stain in this way will keep the wine stain from spreading to other parts of the grout.

After using the acidic cleaner on the red wine stain then the grout may still appear to be stained. Actually, the acidic cleaner has turned red from reacting with the red wine and what you’re seeing is red acidic cleaner in the grout line. At this time you should use an alkaline tile and grout cleaning product to neutralize the acidic cleaning solution and remove the red acidic cleaning solution that is still embedded in the grout line. It is also important to neutralize the grout because you do not want the grout to remain in an acidic state because the types of cement in the grout can start to weaken. Apply the alkaline cleaning solution and allow it to dwell on the stain for 5-10 minutes. After that, you can use a mop or sponge to rinse out the grout and you should see that the red wine stain has disappeared. You may need to repeat the complete grout cleaning procedure a couple of times for extremely stained grout but you eventually should see that the red wine stain has disappeared from the grout.

Life Maid Easy is a fast growing company that offers eco-friendly house cleaning services, maid services and carpet cleaning with franchises across Vancouver, Burnaby, Langley, North Shore, Whiterock and recently Toronto.

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