Polished marble, to seal or not to seal?

[elli]

Hi, there:
I just joined the seal cult recently and try to seal all the stones and grouts I can find in my house. After reading most of posts related to sealing in this forum, I got some limited knowledge about the sealer. Some sealers are good for water and some are good for oil.

However, for polished marble, most seal gurus said it won't adsorb any impregnator/sealer. I got some white marbles as my vanity top and bathtub top. My tile sales said she uses the same stone in her bath rooms. In her master bath, she clean up the water after using. And the marble countertop still looks good. However, in her other bath room, there are some water marks, escpecially the area near the faucet.

As mentioned by MB, there is no good "topical" sealer. Does that mean there is nothing we can do besides wipe out the water after using.

Thanks,
Elli

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[Steven Hauser]

Hi Elli,

The reason phrases such as misinformation and "sealing cult" gets bandied about is due to the fact that most "water stains" are not anything a sealer would have helped prevent.

Instead it is more than likely an etch mark made by something acidic in nature that removed the shine from the counter.

Why water mark? The cleaners predominately used in bathrooms are liquid and usually acidic. This helps break up soap scum.

The marble has a mineral base of calcium carbonate. This is the same stuf that is in stomach antacids. The stomach antacid neutralizes the acid and disapates.

The polished top that has etch probably neutralized some sort of acid.

Hope this helped.

:)

[Maurizio Bertoli]

Hiya there, Elli:

"Does that mean there is nothing we can do besides wipe out the water after using."

Yep, it does mean that!! ;)
What I also want to point out is that even if some water gets absorbed by the stone, nothing bad is ever going to come to it from that. Let's not get paranoid, will ya! :)
Look, it would be to my own financial interest if I joined the choir (that I certainly never started) and cash-in into the "sealing cult!" After all, I do make an impregnator/sealer, and a darn good one at that! :)
But let me tell you something: when all these impregnators first entered the market approximately 15 years ago, they were touted as the stain-preventers for marble. In fact, the granite countertop boom was still to come. Marble was the "big thing" back then and there were reports of trillions of "stains" happening to it coming from all over the place.
In my over 40 years of experience I witnessed to no more than, PERHAPS, a dozen or so true stains on marble. Is it really worth selling and applying billions of $ worth of impregnator/sealers all over marble surfaces to prevent a dozen stains in 40 years??!! :bang: :crazy:
Of course, I've also witnessed my (quite large) share of all the "stains" end-users of marble are actually complaining about, but they are NOT stains - no matter what they look like ("water spots" or "water rings") - they are not connected even remotely to the degree of absorbency of the stone, and, most importantly, no sealer for stone under the sun could do the first thing to prevent them! :uhh:
Sure, with the icreased popularity of granite and "granite", eventually an almost totally uselss product became important. But then again, as soon as impossible blanket rules started to be promoted and applied, problems of a different nature - still related to stain prevention - began to emerge.
Any real solution?
Sure: proper intelligence, which means professionalism, which means knowing your stock and trade.
So far, no matter how hard I looked for it and how shocking it may come to some, I never saw that "stuff" coming in a bottle delivered by UPS!
And the show goes on! ;) :shades:
Ciao and good luck,