Should I seal my grout, and what kind of sealer?
Yes, after it has been properly cleaned. Grout is porous and soaks up grime and spills. The right choice is a penetrating sealer that soaks into the pores and protects from the inside, so liquid beads up. Avoid surface colour-sealing coatings, which sit on top and tend to peel and fail over time.
Sealing is the point, not an upsell
Clean grout with no sealer starts absorbing again immediately. A penetrating sealer soaks into the pores and repels liquid without changing how the grout looks.
It has to go onto grout that is actually clean. Sealing dirty grout locks the soil in, which is worse than not sealing at all.
Why Spiker discontinued colour sealing
Colour sealing applies a pigmented coating over the top, which produces a uniform look immediately. It looks excellent the day it goes down.
It is a coating over grout rather than clean grout underneath, and when it wears it wears unevenly. Correcting that is difficult and expensive. We would rather clean and seal properly than sell something that looks great for a year and becomes a problem in three.
The test you can run yourself
Flick water onto a sealed floor. It should bead up and sit there. That beading is how you know the sealant bonded.
If it soaks straight in, the seal is not working — either nothing was laid down, or what went down peels and patches off. It is also how you catch a company that billed for sealing and skipped it.
And the sealant should cover the tile and the grout together in one layer across the floor, not the grout lines alone.
The follow-up
questions.
A penetrating sealer typically holds a few years in a normal household, less in a kitchen or a high-traffic entry. When water stops beading on the grout line, it is due again.
No, and this is the most common way a new floor gets set up to fail. Sealant only bonds to a prepared surface — the grout haze has to come off with high pressure and hot steam and the floor has to be neutralised. An installer has neither.
No, we discontinued it. It is a coating over the grout rather than clean grout, it wears unevenly, and correcting it is difficult and expensive.
Ready when you are.
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