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The advantages of flooring underlays

Day in day out, floor cov­er­ings must res­ist the stresses caused by count­less steps and heavy loads. They should be as robust as pos­sible, absorb noise, feel warm and com­fort­able under­foot and still look good after many years. No prob­lem if the basic floor struc­ture is right. Under­lays are a good means of provid­ing sound and heat insu­la­tion and also increase the walk­ing com­fort and dur­ab­il­ity of the floor. To reach the best res­ults, you should con­sider the fol­low­ing tips.

Tip 1: The right combination of flooring and underlay

In order to achieve a per­fect inter­play of all lay­ers, the motto is: Soft floor­ing needs a hard under­lay, hard floor­ing a soft one. Elast­ic vinyl or PVC floor­ing, for example, will have few­er pres­sure marks or dents when it is “sup­por­ted” from below. Hard under­lays, how­ever, hardly provide any sound or heat insu­la­tion. Soft, foamed mater­i­als under sol­id wood floor­ing, on the oth­er hand, pro­tect against noise. At the same time, they effect­ively reduce heat loss. This has a pos­it­ive effect on your room cli­mate and heat­ing bill. Thick, soft under­lays are par­tic­u­larly recom­men­ded for use in rooms above the cel­lar.

Tip 2: Be careful with underfloor heating

In con­trast to hard under­lays, soft mater­i­als can impede the flow and trans­fer of heat. It is there­fore advis­able to have an expert cal­cu­late wheth­er the mater­i­als installed above the under­floor heat­ing com­ply with the applic­able lim­it value. A thermal res­ist­ance of 0.15 m² K/W must not be exceeded.

Tip 3: How to avoid harmful substances

Pol­lut­ants tend to migrate through all floor lay­ers and enter the indoor air. To pre­vent this, you should always choose low-emis­­sion under­lays. This is where the EMICODE® EC1 seal on the product pack­aging comes into play. It is awar­ded to those build­ing and install­a­tion products that meet the strict­est emis­sion lim­its world­wide. To obtain the label, the products under­go strin­gent tests in a test cham­ber car­ried out by inde­pend­ent labor­at­or­ies. If the products pass the tests, man­u­fac­tur­ers are allowed to use the seal on the pack­aging. In order to ensure long-term com­pli­ance with the lim­it val­ues, reg­u­lar spot checks are per­formed by inde­pend­ent experts and test­ing insti­tutes.

The advantages of flooring underlays

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7 May 2019