Welcome back to the new edition to the Flooring Inspector’s Blog. I have had a personal incident that prevented me from keeping up the old blog. But we are back.
In my last blog I was often writing about the problems occurring with laminate floors. Laminate floors are made of a variety of wood based products. The laminates were relative humidity dependent. They had a tendency to expand in the humid weather and contract in the dry weather. This style of flooring was often unsuitable in basements due to moisture coming out of the concrete slab. This expansion and contraction caused the floor to move as a whole. If the floor was pinched into place by cabinets, the flooring would come apart at it’s weakest point over a period of time.
At the time of writing this blog, one of the most popular flooring being sold is some form of luxury vinyl plank product. These products are numerous and go by names such as LVP, LVT, SPC, WPC and Rigidboard. These products are not relative humidity dependent by are very heat sensitive. So when you have a bright sun beaming through the windows onto the floors for hours upon end, the flooring will start to expand and contract. If the flooring is being pinched down by kitchen cabinets and islands, the flooring with come apart if its “floating”.
I inspect these products about 300x a year all across Ontario for a variety of manufacturers. I can tell you, I do not even dream about inspecting these products without reading the installation instructions for them. If installers and builders were to do the same thing, we flooring inspectors would have a lot less to do.