Blog for Dover Floor Covering
- Details
- Written by: Jeff Dean
Dover Flooring Blog
January 10th, 2015
Some Facts About Hardwood.....
Hardwood flooring is beautiful, durable and long lasting. Most hardwood flooring is designed to last a lifetime in your home if you take care of it correctly. So, how do you take care of a hardwood floor?
First of all, hardwood flooring is a natural wood product with a wear layer on the surface. Some people think with the newer, harder finishes (aluminum oxide infused, UV cured urathanes) that are applied to the wood that they can just walk all over them without a care in the world. I don't know of any flooring (maybe concrete.....lol) that this is true of. Okay, ceramic tile is extremely tough to ruin also but we're talking about wood here.
A pre-finished hardwood floor still needs careful attention to allow it to remain beautiful for years to
|
|
|
Walk Off Mat |
come. A walk off mat should be located at every doorway leading to the outside, whether that's a garage door, entry door or a door wall leading to the deck. Wherever dirt, sand or other abrasive materials are located that could potentially lodge into the bottom of footwear (and hence scratch the surface of any hardwood flooring), this would be the place to set a mat. Anybody coming in from the outside should be encouraged to wipe their feet on the mat before entering onto the wood flooring or better yet, to take off their shoes. Anybody who has a hardwood floor and has scratches from shoes will know what I'm talking about. Better to be safe than sorry.
Another fact about hardwood concerns the weather and changing seasons (and thereby changing
|
|
|
|
Gaps Between Boards |
|
humidity levels). Wood flooring is still a living (kinda....lol) breathing product. It will expand and contract with differing humidity levels. I've written a blog on this in the past so I won't go into detail here but suffice it to say, wood will contract in the winter with dryer air in the home and will show tiny gaps between individual boards. This is not a defect of the flooring but is a natural reaction to lower humidity levels. The wood will expand and close the gaps when the humidity rises. Either add a humidifier to the home or wait till spring!
|
|
|
|
Swiffers Are Best For Cleaning |
|
Another fact: wood and water don't mix! People like to keep their floors clean and spotless (at least some of us do. lol) but resist the urge to wash your floors as if they were a vinyl floor. Since hardwood flooring is being installed so ofter in kitchens these days (where we cook and drop stuff on the floor. Yikes) people will just grab their mops and have at it. Don't do it. Wood floors are not meant to have that amount of water applied to them. Just spot clean with a damp (not wet) cloth and wipe dry. If you would like to clean the whole floor then a swiffer that cleans with hydrostatic electricity works best for dirt, dust and other dry type particles. Some hardwood flooring manufacturers make a spray cleaner designed specifically for wood and laminate floors which can and should be used (ideally no water). We here at Dover Floor Covering carry Mohawk hardwood flooring and they make their own hardwood flooring cleaner. If you must use water then you would need to squeeze out the excess water from the mop and it should have no more water in it then the clothes in your washing machine after the spin cycle would have.
Another fact: Harder wood flooring will wear similar to softer hardwood flooring. Even though the
urethane finishes applied to most hardwood flooring products these days is the same or similar, differing wood species themselves are vastly different in hardness. So you may buy a Cumaru hardwood floor (which is extremely hard and dense, almost 3 times as hard as red oak) with an aluminum oxide infused, UV cured finish and it will resist surface scratching the same as the afore mentioned red oak floor. So the two hardwood floors will perform about the same when it comes to surface scratching and wear through. What you gain from a harder, denser floor like Cumaru or Brazilian Cherry is dent resistance and deep scratch resistance. The harder wood will be tougher to gouge then it's softer counter parts. Always use floor protectors under any piece of furniture to protect your hardwood flooring from surface scratches.
- Details
- Written by: Jeff Dean
Dover Flooring Blog
January 1st, 2015
Pre-finished Hardwood vs Site Finished Hardwood.....
This week we'll discuss some differences between a site finished hardwood floor and a pre-finished hardwood floor. In general we will be talking about solid 3/4" thick hardwood flooring. This can be of any species because the finish will generally be the same whether it's an oak floor or maple floor or any other species of hardwood.
Pre-finished hardwood flooring in most cases (not all) will have aluminum oxide injected into the finish. Why is that important? Well, aluminum oxide is the second hardest mineral. Only diamonds are harder than aluminum oxide. Putting aluminum oxide into the finish on a hard wood floor will make the finish extremely hard. It's so hard that it is also hard to sand down and refinish the hardwood floor at a later date! Now, ideally, with these new floors with aluminum oxide in the finish, you will not want to sand them down and refinish in the future. If your finish starts to look scratched and worn down (which will be a lot harder to do with these new wood floors) you will want to screen the top layer and apply a new finish. Sanding down through the finish won't be necessary in most cases if you catch it before you have wear through.
Aluminum Oxide is what they use in sand paper!
|
|
|
Aluminum Oxide |
Aluminum oxide is added to the urethane in the finishing process and then the wood floors are UV cured. There is no harder finish out there at this time.
Site finished hardwood is the process of sanding down an unfinished hardwood floor, then applying a sealer and a couple coats (or more) of urethane. The urethane is what constitutes the wear layer on a wood floor. This process is the only way to spruce up an existing floor but not near the best way for a new hardwood floor. You don't have aluminum oxide infused into the urethane wear layer and it's not UV cured. You can use some of the best site finishes out there (such as Mega Traffic) but it still will fall far short of the hardness and wearability of a prefinished hardwood floor.
So, when buying a new hardwood floor, the best way to go is to buy and install a pre-finished hardwood floor that has aluminum oxide in the finish.
- Details
- Written by: Jeff Dean
Dover Flooring Blog
December 10th, 2014
Best Carpet Yarn 3.......
Solution Dyed Carpet Yarn. Simply The Best....
We finish up our discussion on best carpet yarns this week with this blog on solution dyed nylon. The solution dying process is mainly used in commercial grade carpet. You don't see this process used very often in the manufacture of residential carpet but one of the big three carpet mills, Beaulieu, has a new line of carpet using this dying process.
Simply put, solution dying is the process of injecting the dye into the carpet yarn while it is still in liquid (solution) form. When the yarn is extruded the color (dye) is all the way through the yarn. Most carpets are made with greige goods and then dyed to a specific color. In this process the carpet is made with greyish/white colored yarn and then run through a dyer where the yarn is dyed. If you were to cut a carpet yarn in half that is dyed in the conventional method, the inside of the yarn would still be the greyish/white color. If you were to cut a solution dyed nylon carpet yarn in half, you would see that the yarn is colored completely through. Inside and out.
Because of the way solution dyed yarn is dyed, it is very stain resistant, extremely fade resistant and still wears like a nylon yarn (because it is a nylon yarn). So you get all of the benefits of nylon yarn (wear resistance, resiliency and softness) along with the fantastic stain resistance that you would normally see in olefin yarns or polyester carpet yarns.
Some of the best warranties in the business are attached to this style of carpet (and I mean actual warranties, unlike some of the warranties that mills put on their carpets that have so many restrictions and limits that they will almost never pay off on any of their warranties!!).
You can even clean some of the toughest stains using a mixture of half water and half bleach! Try that with any other type of carpet yarn and see what happens........large whiteish blotches will form on your carpet if you were to try this cleaning solution with just about any other type of carpet.
So in our humble opinion, solution dyed nylon is the best carpet yarn to use for residential carpet. Really no need to say anything else....
- Details
- Written by: Jeff Dean
Dover Flooring Blog
November 29th, 2014
Best Carpet Yarn 2.......
So now that we've discussed the value of wear and resilience in carpet yarn, this week we will touch on stain resistance.
Stain resistance has taken on added importance these days as family's lifestyles are getting busier and more hectic. There was a time that most family's wouldn't let you eat in the family room much less the living room. Do you remember as a kid how if you tried to take some food into the family room to watch TV while you ate, your mother would let you know about it. Food and drink just weren't allowed in carpeted rooms. Because of this, wear and resiliency were more important than stain resistance.
These days, everybody eats in the family room. They eat in the living room. And in our bedrooms. And the basement (which are mostly carpeted these days). We pretty much eat everywhere in the house. Because of this (and the resultant spillage. Yikes) carpet has to be stain resistant. What good is carpet that will wear forever if it stains up like crazy.
Scotchgard was one of the first stain protections developed. It was a topical treatment that provided a barrier between dirt, stains etc and the carpet yarn. This barrier stopped stains from penetrating into the carpet as long as you cleaned up the spill relatively fast. Dirt also cleaned off of the carpet. One of the drawbacks to this topical treatment was that after a couple of cleanings, most of the topical treatment was gone leaving the carpet yarn exposed to future spills.
Along came the built in stain protection. Stainmaster, Anso, Weardated and Scotchgard Stain Release were the top brands in built in stain protection applied to mostly nylon carpet yarns. Basically how this worked was that the yarns were treated with a fluorocarbon system. Most carpet yarns when they are extruded will have very fine pores. These pores will absorb spills and are hard to clean out. This is the idea behind hot steam extraction. Hot steam penetrates the yarn and cleans as the steam is extracted out of the yarn. The built in stain protection basically filled these tiny pores thereby creating essentially a solid yarn. This solid yarn won't absorb spills. The stain will stay on the surface of the yarn and is easily cleaned off with a good carpet cleaning solution. Most nylon yarns are treated for stain resistance in this way.
Polyester on the other hand is inherently stain resistant. PET polyester is made with recycled pop bottles. A form of plastic. This yarn is extremely hard to stain. Because of polyesters superior stain resistant properties, this yarn is starting to take market share away from nylon (the fact that polyester costs less than nylon doesn't hurt either).
Olefin yarn (used mainly in Berbers and commercial grade carpet) is also extremely stain resistant because of it's hydrophobic properties (it doesn't absorb water so it won't absorb stains). This is why olefin carpet is solution dyed (the yarns are dyed while they are still in liquid form so the color goes throughout the yarn). Not only does olefin not absorb water or stains but it also doesn't absorb the dye very well during the dying process. So the carpet mills will dye the carpet before extruding the yarn. More on solution dying later (hint: solution dyed nylon, probably the best yarn period as it combines wear ability, resilience and stain resistance in one yarn......)
Wool, since it's a natural yarn and hence porous, will absorb stains and is probably the worst yarn for stain resistance.
Rankings of carpet yarn for stain resistance
- Solution dyed nylon
- Olefin
- Polyester
- Nylon
- Wool
The top three are considered extremely stain resistant and will suffice for most carpet installations where stain resistance is the top priority. Next week more on solution dyed nylon.........the best carpet yarn period (in our humble opinion).
