And welcome back to Flooring Africa. Here we are in the Workshop Studio and today we've
got quite an exciting experiment underway. We are going to be torture testing some wooden flooring,
ultimately oak panels, where we've got one of our partner guests in today, Brian, welcome. [Brian] Thank you.
Tell me a little bit more about what's going to be happening today, like what are we actually
trying to prove. [Brian] Right so we've got Osmo from Germany here and we're going to apply
a couple of common stains that you'll find on your wooden surfaces, onto Osmo versus some of
the other hard wax oils that are available in the South African market. [Barry] Fantastic, so this is about
proving or demonstrating how you get different grades of product available in our marketplace
and how they potentially will respond differently to different
types of staining and that we can't put all of these products into the same category.
There's like entry levels, medium levels, and then there's high levels and it's a bit of
an experiment to define where Osmo is in all of this. [Brian] Yeah absolutely. We want to see if we
can get an Osmo finish here and give you Osmo protection. [Barry] Osmo protection, that sounds fantastic.
We have four boards here. They're all American white oak boards that have been prepared as per
the manufacturer's specifications on their tins. The first board is Osmo. These are two locally made
hard wax oils and over here we have an imported hard wax oil, which is a single coat application.
And over here we have some things we got out of the fridge at home.
So let's give this a bash and then we're going to leave the products
on the wood for about two hours and after two hours we'll wipe them off. Right, so first of all
we have some tomato sauce. We have some cheap red wine. We have some olive oil, soda water,
hand sanitizer, thank you COVID, some really strong coffee and some cola. So let's go.
What's impressive to see here is that all four of these products have beaded
beautifully, so you can see that they're maintaining their surface tension.
This product's already soaking through a little bit on the oil, yeah so I think that's a great
start. We're going to leave these for two hours, how they soak in or don't.
Right so on the imported single coat product, red wine is a problem. That was olive oil.
It's gone right through. This was soda water, this was cola, sorry that was cola and this was
balsamic vinegar. So they've all marked. The tomato sauce has been fine, small mark, nothing serious.
Okay then on the local local oils, red wine again, olive oil again, soda water again,
and balsamic vinegar again. The cola didn't touch this one, which is interesting.
Another local product, red wine problem, not so much of olive, little olive oil,
soda big problem. Cola and balsamic has marked all of them.
So let's have a look at what Osmo does. I can see that there's been something on the surface,
but it seems to have held up very well. I don't have any marks.
Right so as you can see, very different results from the four products.
We understand every every product is different. Every product has its application. In our world we
like to talk about Osmo On Top. Osmo is a really robust hard-wearing surface that will stand up
to pretty much everything you can throw at it and the proof is really in the pudding over here. [Barry] so
you mean to say it's going to be robust for even Barry? [Brian] Barry, some products have their limits.
No, no, but you can see there's a there's quite a dramatic difference between
those four different products and obviously, you know, I love my tomato sauce,
I love my red wine even more, I'm partial to coffee and cola but
that test speaks for itself. [Brian] Yeah absolutely. [Barry] I really look forward to
exploring these ranges a lot further because I've come across so many reports and
impartial inspections where people are paying a lot of money for these floors,
a lot of money for the installation, and then you have the floors fail just with an accidental
glass of red wine going over and it's quite hard to repair. [Brian] Yeah very difficult to repair,
especially when you've got coloured surfaces. All of the products tell you that the products are
easy to repair when they're coloured. They're not actually that easy to repair. Spot repair is very,
very difficult to do so you don't want to be spot repairing. You want a product that will actually
stand up to the stain right off the bat and I think that the proof is in the pudding over here.
Osmo works really well on top of other products as well, so
we've tested it on top of South African finishes and if you're looking for a surface that does this,
you can go and get any color you want from another supplier and you can put Osmo on top, as long as it's
the same base product, so an oil wax blend, which is what this is. [Barry] That is fascinating because
that really provides a solution for our local market. Thank you so much for joining
us here on Flooring Africa in the Studio and being a partner of the Workshop Studio.
We've got so much more to explore. I look forward to having you back on the show. [Brian] Thanks
Barry, that's great thanks and thanks for having us on the show. Right so if you'd like to know more
about Osmo you can find us at osmo.africa, so on the web that's at www.osmo.africa.
We're on Instagram as osmo.africa and Facebook osmo.africa. Thank you very much. [Barry] This is
really exciting. This is what Flooring Africa and the Workshop Studio is all about. It is about
testing products to make sure that we are selling the right products into the right category for the
right project. It is about doing your research and getting the right installer for application,
the right base product. This is the information that I crave as a self-confessed flooring nerd
and we look forward to your support. Please consider subscribing. Hit us in the comments.
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