Concrete stained floor keeps collecting sheetrock dust?

We have a newly concrete stained floor for a house we're building that's been sealed and even after we continually mop it, the floor will very quickly just attract some kind of dust that whitens the color of the floor. Does it need to be re-sealed? Any ideas?

 

Can you tell where the dust is coming from? You say sheetrock, is threre a lot of sheetrock dust? If so, you may just be worrying too soon, that stuff gets everywhere.

 

I am not a concrete expert but it sounds like salt maybe coming up from moisture in the concrete. This is called Efflorescence. It is a white chrystal like powder. The sealer you used is breathing out moisture as it should but also allowing the salt from moisture in your floor to come to the surface. If the sealer was not breathing you would end up with a milky color all over your stained surface under the sealer. Perhaps adding water is not helping things. If the surface had not been sealed and stained already, probably etching with a muriatic acid solution first would have eliminated the salt issue. At this point I would just let things all dry out through the entire concrete pad and only brush off the dust and see what happens over the coming days/weeks.

 

problem is though it's been seemingly doing this for over a month now. the walls have already been painted on the inside and every time the floor is mopped it starts collecting more dust, im not even 100% sure where it's coming from since even if I mop the floor and keep the doors shut it still chalks up and then shines again after mopping again. im told it could be sheetrock dust but im not even sure.

 

It's probably moisture trapped beneath the sealer. It's called "blushing", and it causes the sealer to turn cloudy and hazy-looking. When the floor is wet it doesn't look that way, but it comes back when it's dry. I doubt that it's efflloresence, although it's possible. Blushing is a lot more common than efflorescence.
You need to find out what type of sealer your contractor used. Blushing can sometimes be easily corrected (although the process will stink up the house!). However,sometimes the sealer needs to be stripped.

 

Hey Pecos, I pm'd you btw.

Here's pics of what's going on. This pic shows what it returns to even after being mopped:


This pic shows what it looks like when mopped:


The sealer used was:
QUIKRETE® Coatings | Wet Look High Gloss Sealer Product Detail

Any ideas on what the problem is? We didnt stain and seal until more than 1 month after the concrete had been poured so this should have been enough time to cure presumably? Would waxing help?

 

What happens when you try and wipe some off with a dry cloth only, or using only slightly damp one allowing the floor to dry in a few seconds? Will it remove some of the material and stay clear? It does look like it is material coming up through the sealer and not being removed but spread around like a layer of powder film, rather than a milky color under the sealer, but that is only what I can see in your picture. Either way it most likely was caused because there was still too much moisture in the concrete when you sealed it.

 

Yeah, that definitely looks like it's on top, not under the sealer. When you mop are you changing the water frequently? It looks like the mop is just spreading dirty water around. What are the quarter-sized white things on the slab in the bottom pic?
To me, it doesn't look like blushing or efflorescence.
I believe the quikrete sealer is water based. If acid stain is not properly neutralized prior to sealing with water based sealer, it can cause the sealer to dust off. That may be what's happening here.

 

All the other suggestions sound like far more reasonable than this, but, what the heck:
Do you have especially hard water in your house?
Although not so much in the pictures, your description of the dust ( "like sheetrock dust")could be a description of the dust that occurs when hard water is used in a room humidifier??
When the water evaporates, the dust would remain. (Of course, the dust would not discolor the floor, just leave a coating on it.)

 

Just thought I'd update this thread in case someone else stumbles across it with the same problem. I ended up trying something which seems to be working so far. First I used a clean mop to mop the floor up with which had already seemed to help since the dustyness didn't return as much with a clean mop. Then I dry vac'd the floor to stuck up stuff that may have been just getting mopped around under a floor that wasn't sealed that good. Then I re-sealed the floor with another coat of the high gloss oil based sealer. I found out the sealer I used was oil based, not water based, not sure of the relevance. Anyway, so far, so good, am keeping fingers crossed.

 

My wife uses a Hoover Floormate on our ceramic floors, I've always thought a floor was only clean if the junk on it got removed and I've never felt a mop did that - the Floormate is a scrubber and wet vac in one so you are able to extract everything back off the floor when you're done.