Page 1 - 2017-05-CFR Volume 104 FloorSafe - The Future of Floors and Building Related Illness - May 2017
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Volume 104—May 2017
Moisture in substrates causes upwards of a billion dollars in flooring
failures yearly and it isn’t going away anytime soon. As a matter of
fact the situation is actually getting worse and will continue to do so.
As a result many manufacturers have designed, engineered and built
flooring materials that can be installed without adhesive – ―floating‖
flooring installation systems. These systems eliminate the need for a
separate adhesive and take the failure or compromise of adhesive
by moisture and alkalinity out of the equation but the moisture still
exists despite being taken out of play to foil the adhesive. In fact, in
many cases we’ve made the situation worse. With the moisture still
active beneath the flooring material which is now acting as a topical Hydrostatic Pressure
moisture retarder the perfect culture for breeding mold and mildew
now exists.
There are two types of moisture in a substrate; First, moisture of convenience which comes from the
concrete itself. New concrete on which flooring is installed is more and more often not cured and light-
weight concrete in particular which is highly hydrated and second, ground moisture which comes from
beneath a concrete slab. Furthermore, due to fast track construction and accelerated completion sched-
ules the likelihood of the concrete and the space being ready for installation is faint. There is also no
system for mitigating moisture in concrete that is 100% effective despite what anyone says.
And adhesives making claims to stop moisture don’t. If you believe you can stop moisture
completely then you also believe in the tooth fairy. Two things you don’t stop in any building are
moisture in vapor form and air. If there’s even one small pin hole they’ll find it and spread from
there. And moisture when it exists can overwhelm any system meant to stop it by going over it, under
it, around it or through it. Often times the result is even worse than having done nothing at all. So
where are we going with this?
1 Commercial Flooring Report May 2017
