We often get
asked when delivery should be arranged for the new oak flooring to arrive at
the site address to be stored and acclimatised, and to be quite honest… it’s
not as simple as just saying “a couple of weeks before installation starts”.
Although it may seem the most important issue for your schedule, there are more important potential challenges to cover than just the preferred installation date.
The oak flooring that Oak Floors Online supply will arrive ‘on site’ with a moisture content of around 8-9%, so the time when it’s ready for installation completely depends on the site conditions that it’s to be installed within.
Scenario 1;
The flooring is installed immediately at 8% moisture content and the surrounding subfloor and walls are at 15% and still drying out and giving off moisture
This will force the oak flooring to soak that excess moisture up and expand. Within weeks or sometimes days (depending on site conditions again) the flooring planks will start to push too tightly against each other, simply because they’ve increased in size from absorbing more moisture. This will cause the floor to buckle and lift away from the subfloor, sometimes even expanding so much that it can push out the surrounding walls and cause structural damage.
Scenario 2;
The flooring is installed immediately at 9% moisture content and the surroundings are at 4% moisture content because of the heating system being used (or other possible reasons), so meaning that the new oak floor boards will be forced to lose moisture to reach equilibrium with their surrounding conditions. This situation will cause your individual floor boards to shrink over the coming days and weeks, thus creating gaps between them, which in some extreme cases can actually cause the T&G joints of the boards to shrink so much that they pull apart and become detached from each other.
Both situations above can be costly and very time consuming to put right, so the best way of avoiding such potential challenges is to correctly and sufficiently acclimatise the flooring before installation begins.
The whole reason for acclimatising your new flooring before installation is to allow it to ‘do its moving’ before installation and not afterwards. Lots of information on this available at this link; http://www.oakfloorsonline.co.uk/?template=acclimatisationInfo.html
There is no set time for this because most site conditions will be different in some way, whether that be moisture content, humidity or simply where the site is.
Yes there will be situations when the flooring arrives at exactly the right moisture content for the site conditions but it’s always best to make sure yes?
Something else to bear in mind that’s very relevant to acclimatisation and installation times/dates is that no matter how perfect the conditions and acclimatisation process is, if you allow or force the conditions to change after installation then this will have an effect on the flooring.
In other words, if you force your flooring to change its moisture content (increase or decrease) then each plank within will change dimensionally and cause your finished floor to change shape or structure.
So, to sum up when you should have your new flooring delivered; “arrange delivery for when the building that it’s to be installed within is at moisture and humidity levels that are the same as what they will be when occupied, remembering that those levels should be maintained thereafter to avoid forcing your floor to change dimensionally or structurally”.
