honed marble with water stains and rings

I've installed dark emperidor honed marble in my kitche.... After a short time it is getting water stains and glass rings... It was sealed when installed and they just sanded and sealed it again...now what can be done about the stains?

 

Dear Iris:

Flies are very determined bugs: when they see light ahead they want to get out of the room. So they fly toward the light and they hit a closed windowpane. But they won't give up. So they keep hitting and hitting that piece of glass. Unfortunately flies are stupid, because they don't realize that by doing the same thing over and over they will never get a different result. And that explains why there are dead flies on windowsills.

Now you fabricator installs a piece of honed Emperador in your kitchen and religiously seals it.

Yet, you have “glass rings” and “water stains”…

No kidding! (Which, BTW, they have no relation whatsoever with water or glasses.)

Obviously, the sealing thing does not work, right?

So what does your fabricator do?

Very much like a fly he seals it again, hoping that by doing again the same thing that he did the first time he's gonna get a different result… L

 

“ what can be done about the stains? ”

 

Not much, really, from a technical point of view. When you choose the wrong stone for the wrong place, there are not many solutions, because if there were solutions it would not be the wrong stone in the wrong place, after all, would it?

Now, if that were my countertop I would get rid of it and send a heartfelt thank you note to the fabricator for not having told me that most marbles do not belong in a kitchen – sealed or not sealed; but if my wife insisted to keep it, I would re-hone the whole thing and then apply a color enhancer (like MB-6) instead of an impregnator (what you call sealer), and make friends with the bottle of that product, because every time I will get a “water stain” I would apply the color enhancer again to make it “go away”.

And of course, t he issue of what you'll be doing day in and day out to your stone is – as it should be intuitive – vastly more important than its sealing (if and when possible and/or advisable) and it's all too often neglected. As you can tell by reading many of this site's postings, you're not likely to get good information about routine care from your dealer or installer. Don't become another statistic! By logging into the Helpful Hints section of our website at:  http://www.mbstone.com/HH_promo/helpful_hints.htm, you will be able to get the short version of our maintenance guidelines at no charge. The full version of it – a 7-page document considered by many as an industry benchmark – is available in pay- per-download format in our Educational Literature section at:  http://www.mbstone.com/literature/literature.htm.  

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Thank you  

Ciao and good luck,

Maurizio Bertoli

 

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