What to Do When Entrance Floors Become Dangerously Slippery in Wet Weather

A wet Monday last October, five storey office off Sir John Rogerson's Quay in the Docklands. The building manager rang us at 08:40. Two near misses inside the revolving door before nine. Four cones already out, reception mopping the same three metres every half hour. Our supervisor was on site by 09:20. The first thing he did was take the mop away, because the mopping was the reason the floor kept failing.

The short answer

Stop the water before it reaches the floor. Extend entrance matting to at least a 2.1 metre run in the direction of travel, swap saturated mats during wet spells, dry the floor rather than mopping it repeatedly, remove any polish residue sitting on the surface, and have the slip resistance tested if it still fails wet.

In order, on the day it happens:

1. Segregate the wet area with barriers, not signs alone.
2. Route people through one door you can control.
3. Dry the floor with a flat mop and a dry pass, or a machine, instead of wet mopping.
4. Change saturated mats for dry ones and keep spares.
5. Record the time, the action and who did it.

That is the emergency response. The permanent fix depends on which of three things is actually wrong, and most entrances get misdiagnosed.

Why entrances turn dangerous the moment it rains

A hard floor that feels perfectly safe on a dry Tuesday can become a hazard in minutes once rain starts. It is not the volume of water that does it. It is the thinness of the film.

Smooth flooring has very little microroughness, the tiny peaks measured as Rz that give a shoe sole something to bite into. Under a thin water film those peaks are submerged. The sole then hydroplanes across the surface with almost nothing resisting it. Ironically, a puddle you can see is often less dangerous than a barely visible film, because people walk around a puddle.

The second factor is transport. People carry water in on their soles and umbrellas, and in a busy Dublin lobby that water travels six to eight metres past the door before the sole runs dry. Most entrances are matted for about two of those metres, so the wet is delivered exactly where the matting ends.

Then there is the season. Ireland's wet pattern runs from roughly October to January, when rainfall and footfall overlap with short daylight and dark clothing on wet stone. Met Éireann's long term averages will tell you how many wet days your part of Dublin usually gets. Our own callout log tells us the same story more bluntly. Entrance incidents cluster in the first three wet weeks of autumn, before anyone has adjusted the rota.

Diagnose it before you buy anything

This is where money gets wasted. A facilities manager rings three suppliers, gets quoted three different products, and buys the one that answers the phone fastest. Half the time the product was never the answer.

There are only three underlying causes. Nearly every slippery entrance is one of them, or two of them stacked.

Catalin's note: Most entrances I am called to have a matting problem dressed up as a cleaning problem. The cleaners get blamed because they are the ones standing there with the mop. Nine times out of ten the water is simply arriving faster than the entrance can absorb it.

Water arriving faster than the entrance absorbs it. This is a matting failure. The mats exist, but they are too short, too saturated, or in the wrong place. A soaked mat is not a control, it is a reservoir. If you can press a shoe onto the mat and see water come up, that mat stopped working hours ago.

The floor is not slip resistant when wet. This is a specification failure, and it is not the cleaner's fault. The floor was chosen for how it looks dry. Polished porcelain and polished terrazzo photograph beautifully and fail wet. No cleaning method will fix a surface that has no wet grip designed into it.

The cleaning regime is leaving a film. This is a method failure. Overdosed detergent, no rinse, or layered maintainer polish leaves a soft film that turns greasy under water. This is the one that gets worse the harder people work at it, which is why the Docklands reception was mopping itself into a hazard.

Run that table before you spend anything. It takes twenty minutes and it usually reframes the whole conversation.

What to do in the first hour

If you have already had a near miss this morning, this is the sequence. It is designed to be defensible as well as practical, because you will want a record of it later.

1. Segregate rather than sign. Put barriers or a taped run around the wet area so people physically cannot walk it. A wet floor sign is a warning, not a control.
2. Reroute to one entrance you can staff and watch. Two half managed doors are worse than one managed door.
3. Dry the floor, do not mop it. Use a flat mop with a dry pass behind it, or a machine that lifts water. Repeated wet mopping simply resets the hazard.
4. Swap every saturated mat for a dry one. If you have no spares, this is the moment you find that out.
5. Record the time, the action taken and the name of the person who took it. A photograph timestamps itself.
6. Brief reception properly. They are your eyes on that floor for the next eight hours, and they need to know what to do rather than what to worry about.
7. Photograph the entrance before and after. Two photos have settled more disputes than any amount of recollection.

Do not let anyone tell you that putting out more cones counts as taking action. Under Irish health and safety thinking, a warning sits near the bottom of the hierarchy of control. It is what you do while you fix something, not instead of fixing it.

How to fix it properly

Once the morning is under control, you are choosing between three fixes. Usually you need two of them.

Matting first, because it is the cheapest win

BS 7953:1999 covers entrance flooring systems, and the commonly specified starting point is a run of about 2.1 metres in the direction of travel. That is a starting point, not a target. High footfall entrances in the IFSC and the Docklands often need considerably more, because the sole is still wet at four metres.

Specify it properly:

• An external scraper zone to take grit and bulk water off the sole.
• An internal absorbent zone to take the remaining moisture.
• Full door width, with no gaps at the edges where people cut the corner.
• Bevelled edges and a non slip backing, so you do not solve a slip and create a trip.
• A daily changeover during wet spells, and a second set in rotation so there is always a dry one ready.

That last point is where most sites fall down. One mat, no spare, changed weekly. It works for three days in September and fails on the first wet Monday. If your mats are hired, check what the changeover frequency actually is on the contract rather than what you assume it is. Our carpet and rug cleaning team handles lobby carpet and mat cleaning on the same visit for a lot of our sites, which keeps the rotation honest.

Cleaning method, because the wrong one causes the problem

A well meant cleaning regime can be the hazard. What we look for and fix:

• Dilution control. Overdosed detergent leaves a film that behaves like a lubricant once wet.
• Neutral pH products on sealed and polished floors, with a proper rinse pass.
• No maintainer polish or spray buff on a wet entrance zone. It looks superb, and it kills wet grip.
• Flat mop with a dry pass behind it, or machine drying, so the floor is walkable within a minute.
• Wet cleaning scheduled outside footfall hours, not at 10am when the building is full.

A Sandyford business park reception taught us this one properly. Beautiful, glossy lobby, slippery every wet morning, and the client was ready to spend on an anti slip coating. We tested a discreet metre first and found layered maintainer polish, several years of it. We stripped it back, changed to a neutral pH method with a dry pass, and the entrance passed wet without any coating at all. The floor underneath had been fine the whole time. Nobody had looked under the shine.

Treatment and testing, when the surface genuinely fails

If matting is right and the method is right and it still goes over wet, the surface is the problem and now testing earns its keep.

Pendulum testing to BS 7976 is the method used across Ireland. It measures the floor wet, which is the only state that matters at an entrance in October. It produces a pendulum test value, or PTV. The UK Slip Resistance Group bands, used widely here, read like this:

You will also see DIN 51130 R ratings, R9 through R13, quoted when new floors are specified. R9 is the base and is not a wet entrance floor. R11 upward is what you want people specifying for a lobby that meets the weather. R ratings describe a product on a ramp in a lab, though, so they tell you what to buy, not how your existing floor is performing today. Coefficient of friction figures on a data sheet are the same story.

Where the surface fails, there are two routes. Etch treatments chemically increase microroughness on porcelain and stone, and on a polished floor a good one is close to invisible. Coatings add a layer with grip built in, more visible, more durable in heavy traffic. Either way, test before and after. Anyone who promises you a PTV outcome without testing the floor first is guessing with your liability.

A real site example: the Docklands lobby that got worse every time it was mopped

Back to that Monday. Polished porcelain, revolving door, roughly 900 people through it before ten. Reception had been told to keep the floor clean, so they mopped every thirty minutes with a string mop and a bucket, and every pass left a fresh wet film across the busiest three metres. Every incident in their log was within twenty minutes of a mop pass. Nobody had put those two columns side by side.

What we found and changed:

Before

• Barrier matting of about 1.2 metres, one set, no spare, saturated by 08:30.
• String mop and bucket, no rinse, no dry pass.
• Four cones as the only control.
• Cleaning specification written for appearance, no wet weather variation.

After

• Matting extended past three metres with an external scraper section, two sets in rotation, changed twice on wet days.
• Flat mop with a dry pass, machine drying at peak, wet cleaning moved to 06:00.
• Barrier segregation for genuine spills, cones downgraded to what they are.
• A wet weather rota written into the specification, with a sign off sheet at the end of each shift.

No coating. No floor replacement. The surface passed wet once the residue was gone and the water was stopped at the door. Three winters on, that entrance has had no reportable incidents. The cost was matting and an hour of rota redesign.

Your legal position in Ireland

This is the part most readers are really asking about. The question underneath the phone call is usually, if somebody goes down this week, can I show I acted reasonably.

Irish duties sit in a few places. Under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 an employer has general duties to manage risks to employees and to others affected by the work. S.I. No. 299 of 2007, Regulation 9(1)(a), is more specific about floors. It requires that floors have no dangerous bumps, holes or slopes, and that they are fixed, stable and, so far as is reasonably practicable, not slippery. The Health and Safety Authority publishes guidance on slips, trips and falls, including material dealing specifically with entrances, and it is worth reading before your next risk assessment rather than after an incident.

Separately, the Occupiers' Liability Act 1995 sets the common duty of care an occupier owes to visitors under section 3. That Act was amended by the Courts and Civil Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2023, which sharpened how courts weigh the probability and severity of injury against the practicability and cost of the precautions available.

Catalin's note: If a claim lands, you want a folder, not a memory. The survey, the method statement, the shift records showing mats were changed, the before and after test results, and a signed off checklist. Clients who can hand that over tend to have short conversations with insurers. Clients who cannot tend to have long ones.

That folder is the reason we document what we do. It is not paperwork for its own sake. It is the only durable proof that a reasonable precaution was taken on the day it mattered.

DIY or call a contractor

Plenty of this you can run in house. Some of it you should not.

We had an office manager in Ballsbridge, a clinic entrance with real public footfall, who had already bought an anti slip solution online and applied it herself one weekend. It did nothing visible and nothing measurable, because the floor was carrying old polish and the treatment never reached the surface. Fifty euro of product, an unhappy Monday, and the actual problem untouched. We tested first, stripped back, then retested. Only then did we know whether a treatment was needed at all. Testing before treating is not us being fussy. It is the difference between fixing a floor and decorating it.

If you already have a cleaning contract in place, this is a conversation to have with them before you buy anything. Our commercial cleaning services in Dublin include entrance diagnosis as part of the survey, and for tenanted buildings our office cleaning in Dublin teams build the wet weather variation straight into the daily specification.

Preventing it before next winter

The sites that never ring us in October are the ones that did this in September. Ten things, with the month each one matters most.

• September: measure your matting run from the door and compare it to 2.1 metres minimum.
• September: order a second mat set so rotation is possible.
• September: strip and inspect the entrance floor before the weather turns.
• October: move wet cleaning to before 07:00 and add a dry pass to the method.
• October: write the wet weather rota into the cleaning specification, not into someone's head.
• October: check the spill kit, barriers and a dry mat store are actually stocked.
• November: brief reception and security on segregation and on recording incidents.
• November: pendulum test the entrance if you have had any near miss at all.
• December: check external drainage and thresholds before the heavy weeks.
• January to March: review the incident log against the cleaning log and adjust.

A dental practice we look after in Dublin 2 did nothing on this list except number four. They moved their wet clean from 09:15 to 06:00, dry by the time the first patient arrived. That entrance has not been an issue since. Sometimes the fix is a clock, not a chemical. The same applied at a Leopardstown office park where the problem turned out to be footfall from the park path bringing grit and water in on a route nobody had matted at all.

Cost, timing and disruption

There is no honest fixed price for this, and anyone quoting one over the phone has not seen your entrance. What moves the number:

• Floor area of the wet zone, not the whole building.
• Floor type, since porcelain, terrazzo and sealed concrete respond differently.
• Whether pendulum testing is needed before and after.
• Out of hours access, which usually costs a little more and saves a great deal of disruption.
• Matting hire versus purchase, and how many sets you need in rotation.

Most entrance work can be done overnight or at the weekend, so the building opens normally. Premier quotes after a survey rather than over the phone, because the survey is what tells us whether you need matting, a method change, a treatment, or just a different start time.

Frequently asked questions

Why does my entrance get slippery only when it rains? Because a thin water film submerges the microroughness that gives a shoe grip. The floor may be perfectly safe dry and fail wet. Water is also carried in on soles, so the wet arrives well past the door and lands wherever your matting ends.

How long should entrance matting be? BS 7953:1999 covers entrance flooring systems, and about 2.1 metres in the direction of travel is the commonly specified starting point. Busy entrances often need three metres or more, split between an external scraper zone and an internal absorbent zone.

Are wet floor signs enough in Ireland? No. A sign is a warning, not a control. Under S.I. No. 299 of 2007 floors must, so far as is reasonably practicable, not be slippery. Use barriers and segregation while you fix the cause, and record what you did.

What is a pendulum test value and what score do I need? A PTV comes from a pendulum test to BS 7976, measured wet. Using the UK Slip Resistance Group bands applied here, 36 and above is low slip potential, 25 to 35 is moderate, and below 25 is high. Entrances should be tested wet, not dry.

What does R11 mean? R ratings come from DIN 51130, a ramp test used when specifying new floors. They run R9 to R13. R9 is not suitable for a wet entrance. R11 or above is a reasonable specification for a lobby exposed to weather, though the rating describes the product, not your installed floor today.

Does the cleaning product cause slippery floors? It can. Overdosed detergent, a missing rinse, or layered maintainer polish leaves a film that turns greasy under water. If your entrance is worse right after cleaning, suspect the method before you suspect the floor.

Who is liable if a visitor slips in a Dublin lobby? It depends on control and on what precautions were reasonable. The Occupiers' Liability Act 1995, as amended in 2023, weighs the probability and severity of injury against the practicability and cost of precautions. Your records of what you did are what decide it in practice.

Can polished porcelain be made slip resistant? Usually yes. An etch treatment increases microroughness and on a polished floor can be close to invisible. Test a discreet area first, and test the floor before and after so the improvement is measured rather than assumed.

How often should mats be changed in winter? Daily as a minimum during wet spells, and twice or more on heavy rain days at busy entrances. Keep a second set in rotation. A saturated mat holds water on the surface instead of taking it away.

Do I need testing before treatment? If matting and cleaning method are already right and the floor still fails wet, yes. Testing tells you whether the surface is the problem and gives you a before figure to prove the treatment worked. Treating an untested floor is how people spend money twice.

Get your entrance checked before the next wet week

If your entrance has already given you a near miss this year, do not wait for the next wet Monday to find out whether the mats are long enough. We offer a free site survey focused on the entrance zone. We walk the water route, check the matting run, look at the cleaning method and tell you plainly which of the three causes you actually have, including when the answer is that it is not a cleaning job at all.

Work can be scheduled out of hours so the building opens as normal. Every job comes with our redo guarantee, if the clean is not right we do it again free, along with a named account manager, documented sign off you can hand to an insurer, and direct access to Catalin if something needs a decision fast.

Call 086 083 6141, email enquiries@premiercontractcleaning.ie, or book a free site survey. If you would rather see what other Dublin facilities managers say first, read our reviews.

Written by Catalin Fatul, Managing Director of Premier Contract Cleaning, a family run Dublin commercial cleaning company working across the IFSC, the Docklands, Dublin 2, Dublin 4 and Ballsbridge, Sandyford and Leopardstown.

Catalin Fatul

Catalin Fatul is the founder and expert behind Premier Contract Cleaning, dedicated to providing top-notch cleaning solutions and tips. With a passion for cleanliness and a commitment to quality, Catalin brings years of experience in the cleaning industry to help readers maintain pristine spaces. Whether it's offering the latest cleaning hacks or recommending the best products, Catalin's mission is to make cleaning efficient, effective, and enjoyable.