FOCUS ON WOOD & LAMINATE
Nature vs. Nurture Russell Calder, Marketing Director at wood flooring specialist Havwoods,
compares the features of both solid and engineered wood flooring to help you advise your customers on the best flooring for their home and lifestyle.
Any reputable wood floor brand will produce their flooring with a tongue and groove profile or a click system profile. Either way, the only useable part of any wooden floor is what we call the wear layer and this is the section of wood above the top of the tongue. Essentially, it is the usable piece of the wood floor and when we say usable we are referring to the fact that most of us want to know that if the floor gets damaged we could sand it down and re-finish it if required. With a 15mm engineered oak floor, the typical thickness of oak above the tongue is circa 4mm and if you were to look at a 15mm solid oak floor the amount of oak above the top of the tongue would also be circa 4mm, maybe slightly more but not much. So, essentially, there is very little benefit in terms of oak wear layer by choosing a solid but this is really only just a small reason to choose an engineered when you consider what I am about to explain further.
A solid oak floor is far more likely to expand or contract when subjected to changes in the surrounding atmosphere. In the winter months, we close the doors and turn the heating on which dries the air out and the relative humidity (RH) of the
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air reduces, in turn meaning that your wood floor will lose moisture. As the moisture content of the floor drops, it will start to shrink and you can expect gaps between boards. There are ways to counteract this with humidifiers but it’s not a solution many of us want to accept. Conversely, in the summer we open doors, switch off the heating and the sun draws moisture from the ground. This creates a higher relative humidity which enters our homes through the open doors and windows and the wooden floor starts to absorb moisture and expand, if the floor absorbs too much moisture the expansion will be too great and the floor could start to lift. Most of this can be avoided with a good quality engineered floor.
With an engineered oak floor, the section of oak is at least one third of the thickness compared to a solid oak floor in the same dimension and for this example we will talk about a 4mm layer of oak. Cutting it to 4mm immediately reduces the tension strength of the oak which does not mean it is weaker in terms of hardness or durability but simply it has less tension strength. This thinner section of oak is then bonded to a substrate such as plywood and I want to explain
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