How to Clean Artificial Grass: The Ultimate Guide
Artificial grass is famous for how little maintenance it needs, and when compared to real grass, that’s certainly true – an artificial lawn can easily last more than a decade if properly taken care of.
That’s right! From cleaning up debris, preventing weeds, and preparing for rainfall, you still need to perform tasks to ensure your fake grass stays in the best shape and continues to make your lawn appear immaculate for years to come.
What’s more, cleaning artificial grass is simple! And this blog post is your ultimate guide on how to go about it!
Challenges When Cleaning an Artificial Lawn
When trying to maintain artificial grass and keep it clean, there are a few common challenges you’ll face. It is important to identify these challenges and devise methods to handle each one – this is precisely what this section is for:
Clearing Debris
Leaves, fur, and dirt: Your artificial turf will regularly gather debris. If not properly and regularly disposed of, some types of debris, like leaves, might rot and disintegrate and permanently damage the artificial grass.
When you clean fake grass, however, you need to be careful since it is delicate, especially if it has a sand infill. A power brush, a soft rake, or a leaf blower is enough to clear out most dust and debris. If the debris is particularly stubborn, like chewing gum, a knife can be used. Though, you need to be careful.
Clean Drinks and Spillages
Drinks and spillages are problems for artificial grass on two counts: They stain the fake grass and give it a foul odour. To make sure neither is permanent, you need to quickly clean the artificial grass after a spillage happens.
Thankfully, the cleaning process is not complicated. Simply rinsing the fake grass is enough in most circumstances. You should be careful and avoid using harsh chemicals or cleaning agents, however, as you run the risk of discolouring the artificial grass.
Preventing Weed Growth
Unlike natural grass, weed growth isn’t common in an artificial lawn. It is one of the primary reasons homeowners prefer it over a natural lawn. Nevertheless, there are still times when weed might appear on your turf, and it is important to learn how to deal with it:
- Temporary solution: Most artificial lawns don’t have a natural soil infill, which severely limits the growth of weeds, so carefully plucking them will be enough to put an end to them. A water-based weed killer can also be used, though you need to ensure it doesn’t include any chemicals that can damage the fake grass.
- Permanent solution: In most instances, installing an anti-weed membrane is enough to entirely prevent the growth and spread of weeds in your artificial turf. Membranes are affordable and the installation process is simple, so it is worth considering if weed is a constant worry!
Handling Snow and Ice
Because snow and ice damage natural grass, there’s a common misconception the same holds for fake grass. This isn’t true at all. Whether snow accumulates or icicles form, it won’t cause damage to artificial grass.
Not only is it possible, but the recommended way to handle snow is by giving them time to naturally thaw. As long as your artificial lawn has a proper drainage system, the ice should completely clear by itself and you’ll be left with your artificial grass looking as excellent as it has always been.
If you want to use the lawn for an outing or an event, and you can’t wait for the snow to naturally thaw by itself. You can rely on a plastic snow shovel to clear the lawn. Traditional shovels are far too harsh on artificial grass and can’t be used.
Tips To Keep the Artificial Grass Cleaner
Though cleaning artificial grass might sound complicated at first glance, there are a few tips that can immensely help homeowners in maintaining their turf. Here, we’ve compiled the most useful ones:
Keep a Consistent Schedule
A great way to ensure you keep your synthetic turf clean is by creating and sticking to a cleaning schedule. The content, timing, and frequency of the cleaning jobs don’t matter as much as making sure you clean the artificial grass in your lawn regularly. Fake grass requires little maintenance, but you must perform the small amount of maintenance it does require.
Ideally, however, the thoroughness and frequency of the cleaning will reflect your needs, the type of artificial lawn you have, and your availability. Here are a few useful questions you can ask yourself before designing a cleaning schedule: How often do you use your lawn? Do you eat, drink, or BBQ on your lawn often? Do you own pets or children?
A Proper Drainage System
Even if water pooling and poor drainage are more of a problem for real lawns, they still can happen in synthetic turfs, especially in wet climates like the United Kingdom. Making certain your fake grass has proper drainage not only ensures its durability and longevity but also makes cleaning and maintaining the garden much easier.
Three key tasks guarantee proper drainage:
- A properly graded property: by grading your property, ascertaining whether it has any low-lying areas, and addressing them, you make it much harder for water to pool in specific spots.
- Correctly installed artificial grass: a lot of drainage problems in artificial lawns trace back their sources to improper installation. Ideally, an artificial grass lawn should have a drainage base that allows rainwater, melted snow, etc. to pass through. If this base is missing, your lawn will have a much higher chance of experiencing water pooling and other drainage issues.
- The sub-base: Your choice of sub-base is also important. Some sub-bases are much better at letting water through than others. At Timberstore, for example, not only do we offer artificial grass in West Sussex, but we also have high-quality permeable granite dust on offer to make sure our clients can design an ideal lawn with our artificial grass.
Choose an Approach Best Suited for Your Artificial Lawn
A constant theme throughout this article has been how much your artificial lawn is impacted by your choice of membrane, infill, crushed fines, and sub-base. These largely determine the property of your lawn, and you can’t afford to not take them into account when you clean artificial grass.
If your lawn has a drainage base and a rock sub-base, you’re far more free to use water to clean stains. If your lawn has a layer of sand, which is commonly used and improves the stability of the synthetic grass, then you have to be extra careful when you use a leaf blower. If the lawn includes some sort of soil, you might need to frequently use a weed killer to prevent weeds from growing. These are just a few examples of the countless ways the components of your synthetic lawn influence how you approach the cleaning process.
Use the Right Tools To Clean Fake Grass
If you want to clean fake grass, you need to use the proper tools for the job: It makes the job easier and faster while minimising the risk of damage to the artificial grass.
Thankfully, most of the tools you need to clean artificial grass are common and are largely identical to the ones you need to take care of real lawns: a rake, a groomer, a broom, a garden hose, and deionizers or enzyme cleaners.