FEATURE CHECK THE CLIMATE
Jason Spangler, sales manager for Wagner Meters, highlights the importance of monitoring ambient conditions to help prevent floor failure caused by moisture damage.
Hidden moisture rises to the top of concrete subfloors aſter floor installation.
While monitoring ambient conditions and surface moisture can’t give you a comprehensive picture of how much moisture your concrete subfloor contains, it can give you information about how much moisture is in the air and on the surface of the floor.
But what makes this information so useful? Here’s a spoiler! It can help you understand what you need to do to protect your floors from moisture-related damage.
Learn how it does this as we walk you through:
• The purpose of monitoring ambient conditions. • How to monitor it. • How to incorporate it into your routine.
We’ll start by explaining what about monitoring ambient conditions is so useful.
THE PURPOSE OF MONITORING AMBIENT CONDITIONS
Monitoring ambient conditions and surface moisture helps you identify any environmental problems that could lead to moisture damage.
The most serious source of moisture damage comes from deep within your concrete subfloor. It is identified through relative humidity (RH) testing via in-situ probes.
If left unchecked, this moisture would cause more and more problems over time. It could eventually require costly repairs – even total-floor replacements. RH tests like our Rapid RH
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in-situ probes help prevent this by alerting us of the moisture hiding deep within the subfloor.
In this way, RH testing is the best way to identify moisture issues that could damage floors because even if surface conditions may seem appropriate at the time of installation, those conditions will change after the floor is installed, potentially causing an issue with the installation.
At the same time, it’s important to acknowledge that concrete subfloors aren’t the only source of excess moisture. Changes in ambient conditions can cause moisture to condense on your floors. From there it will be absorbed, leading to potential moisture damage – particularly adhesive failure at the time of installation.
This is where ambient moisture monitoring and temperature testing of the surface of the concrete come in. Together, they help you identify potential red flags that may negatively impact your installation.
By monitoring ambient conditions and surface temperature you’ll also ensure:
• Your service conditions are correct and won’t throw-off your RH testing results per ASTM F2170.
• You didn’t miss any moisture in the air that could have been absorbed into the surface of the concrete, after you’ve finished your RH testing.
But how do we monitor ambient conditions and concrete surface temperature that together, may cause problems with surface moisture?
www.tomorrowscontractfloors.co.uk
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