Caring for a Coir Mat: Cleaning, Shedding and Weather

Coir is a working fiber with a few likes and dislikes. It wants to stay mostly dry, it sheds when it is new, and five minutes of care a month buys it years of extra service. This is what we tell our own customers: what to do each week, what never to do, and what is normal for a natural fiber.

Two rules

A coir mat is thousands of stiff coconut fibers held upright in a dense pile or woven into yarn. The fibers do the cleaning: they flex, scrape and let dirt fall down into the pile. Two rules follow from that.

Keep dirt moving out of the pile. Grit packed into the base grinds the fiber down, and a clogged pile stops scraping because the fibers cannot flex.
Never let the mat stay soaked. Wet fiber weakens at the root and pulls loose. Nearly every coir mat that fails early fails from standing water, not from feet.

Every week or two: dry cleaning

Shake it out. Lift the mat and shake it hard, or beat it against a railing. Most of what a coir mat collects sits loose in the pile and leaves at once.
Vacuum with suction only. Turn off the beater bar if you can: a spinning brush is too rough on coir and makes it shed faster.
Brush along the pile. For ground-in dirt, work a stiff brush across the mat in one direction. It lifts the dirt and stands crushed fibers back up.

In a muddy season, do this every week. Mud is easier dry than wet: let it dry right through, then crack it off with the brush.

Spills and spots

Clean the spot, not the mat. Blot a spill straight away with a dry cloth rather than rubbing it in. For something sticky or greasy, use a cloth barely damp with mild soap and water, work along the fibers, then blot dry.

Do not hose the mat down, soak it or put it in a washing machine. Soaking is the most damaging thing you can do to coir: it weakens the fiber, strains the back and lets mildew into the base of the pile. If a mat does get drenched, stand it on edge where air reaches both sides, in the sun if you can, and let it dry right through before it goes back down.

Shedding: what is normal

Every new coir mat sheds. Making it leaves short, loose fibers in the pile, and they work free in the first two to four weeks of use. You will sweep bristles off the step for a while. That is normal, it is not a fault, and it falls off sharply once the loose fibers are gone. A broken-in mat sheds only a little, mostly when it is beaten or brushed hard.

What is not normal is heavy shedding that goes on past the first month or starts again later. That almost always means the mat is staying wet and the fiber is rotting at the base. Check that it dries fully between wettings and that water is not pooling underneath.

Rain, sun and snow

Rain. Occasional rain does no harm if the mat can drain and dry. Steady rain, or roof runoff landing on the mat, soaks it faster than it dries. If your door has no cover at all, coir is the wrong mat there; Coir, rubber or synthetic says what to use instead.
Sun. Coir's gold pales toward wheat in the sun. That is only color. Years of all-day sun go further: the fiber dries out, turns brittle and snaps underfoot. Some shade keeps both the color and the spring.
Snow and ice. Brush snow off before it melts into the pile. Keep ice-melt salt off and away from the mat; the brine soaks in and breaks the fiber down.

The longest-lived mats we know share one place: a covered entrance with a hard, level floor that does not hold water.

Making it last

Turn it end for end every month or two. Wear gathers where feet land; turning it spreads the wear and keeps the pile even.
Lift it after wet weather. Check the floor underneath is dry. Water trapped under a mat attacks it from the back, where you will not see the damage until it is far along.
Match the mat to the traffic. A thin mat at a busy door wears out much sooner than a thick one. A family's main door or a shop door earns ¾″ or more; a side door that is rarely used does fine at ½″.

Looked after this way, a good coir mat at a covered door gives roughly two to five years of daily use, and often more indoors.

When to replace it

Coir wears out slowly, so go by how it works, not how it looks. Replace it when the pile is crushed flat and no longer springs back after brushing, when bald patches show the back where people walk, or when it sheds all the time because the base has rotted. No care brings the scraping back after that.

Replacing a mat that never quite fit? Cut the new one to size, up to 33 ft long and 6 ft wide, to the half inch. It ships the next business day.

Caring for a coir mat, with honest notes on shedding