So SPC
Flooring. It's got origins that date back to probably 1890s
something or ever, I think was the date when PVC which is?
Polyvinyl chloride. Well done.
Was invented by accident by a scientist and they really didn't know
what to do with it.
And then by about the 1930s they came up with the use for vinyl flooring.
Then vinyl flooring sort of went dead because the product itself
wasn't available because of the war and then eventually around about the 1970s
we started to get these lovely,
lovely products and I think you'll agree it was an absolute gem of a product.
I think people remember them.
They were these little tiles that you peel and stick
and you stuck them to the floor.
But that is the very,
very first type of vinyl flooring that was available commercially.
It moved through to the linoleum, marmoleum, PVC flooring,
and eventually we ended up with something like this, which was the basis of LVT
plank flooring, which came about around about in the 1980s.
The trouble was then they discovered that there was asbestos in the actual product
and it was nearly banned from production.
So PVC flooring was really saved and then died and then has come back again.
So the moral to the story is if you were lifting up floors from the 1980s,
you need to do a survey to make sure there's no asbestos
within that product before you lift and dispose of it.
So yeah, we've come a long way.
So this was project one if you like, this is Project two
and now we've come to what we call SPC, which is stone plastic composite flooring.
So it's still vinyl,
it's still got PVC in it, but it's mixed with calcium carbonate.
And the quality of your board depends on your mix
that comes together and we'll discuss that a little bit later on.
So how it's made is several layers.
You've got a sample in front of you on the, on your seats.
On the very top is something you can't see.
It's called an anti-scratch UV coating, very important for the South
African market because we got UV rays like no other country in the world.
UV rays will kill pretty much any type of flooring.
So your UV anti-scratch coating is a very, very important factor.
You can't see it, you can't touch it, you can't smell it.
But it's like having a pair of sunglasses on your floor.
And we all know good quality sunglasses versus poor quality sunglasses.
And this is also quite a discerning point that while there is product out there
that and there is one other product out there like you, you don't necessarily
know what you're missing if you can't physically see it.
But I implore you, when you're receiving your samples
from the various suppliers, take a key and go and scratch across it.
Compare a couple of different brands together and you'll very quickly notify
you'll very
quickly be aware of the difference. Okay.
So then you've got your wear layer. Again,
you can't see it, you can't touch it, you can not necessarily know it's there,
but your wear layer is what protects the floor
from the feet that are walking on top of it.
In South Africa, you get a wear layer from a 0.3mm
up to a 0.7, but a 0.3 and a 0.5, 0.55
is probably the norm in the industry, there's guys in between.
But from our perspective, 0.3 this a domestic product
going up to a light commercial.
But I find a light commercial spec to be very, very vague.
Light commercial can be a doctor's waiting rooms in private
practice where you maybe sees ten or 15 patients a day.
But if you go into the public clinics where they're going to see
100 people a day, that is not considered to be a light commercial.
So when you specifying a 0.3mm wear layer, make sure
that you're specifying it for the right area.
My personal belief is 0.3 is domestic.
Let's leave that commercial to a 0.5.
So 0.5 0.55 is your commercial where layer
and that should give you a warranty of up to 15, maybe even 20 years
in a commercial environment depending on the quality of the actual wear layer itself.
The decor paper,
that is what you can see through the things that you can't see.
In other words, it's a picture of the product.
In this instance,
you're looking at a Woodgrain if you go outside, you'll see stone look,
you can have pretty much anything imaginable printed onto your LVT
or SPC flooring provided the volume is there.
We just did a job now of six and a half thousand squares
where we've basically done a copy of a product for someone's specifications.
So if the volume is there and your imagination wants to go there,
then we can actually have that product produced for you.
Takes a little bit of a while, but it can be done.
And this is probably the most important part.
Your core board.
This is what we were saying is your PVC polyvinyl chloride mixed with
calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate or otherwise chalk.
Exactly. Chalk doesn't seem very hard.
Then when mixed with PVC, becomes a very, very stable product.
The differences in quality is dependent on the quality of your raw materials
and the quantities. The higher the calcium carbonate,
the more brittle the board is going to be
and the more chance you could have failure.
So I do this gingerly.
A good quality vinyl should be flexible.
In other words, you should be able to do that with it.
And this is a key, important area and likely we're going to get into it.
That that flexibility is absolutely paramount when you have
slight undulations in your substrate, in your joints structure,
that it doesn't crack when there is a little bit of movement.
So if you add too much chalk, it gets brittle.
So when you have that little bit of extra weight or the slight undulation,
the joint structure will actually shear, you get what we call vertical shear
and then then we start having a whole host of problems.
So I think you can see that that's probably the key point is
Barry was saying if you've got it too hard,
then the joints are going to snap the bboard is going to snap,
it's not going to last the lifetime that we want it to last.
And then finally on the back, you'll find that there's an underlay.
That is the only thing you must put underneath an SPC.
You must not put any Combilays,
underlays or anything else
other than plastic sheeting, which will come too in just a second.
That is there to take up minor lumps and bumps in the subfloor.
It's there to suppress sound.
So if you're in a multistory building, you don't walk on the floor
and someone down below hears you stomping around on the floor.
It's the most annoying thing in the world, in my opinion.
So that's there to suppress sound,
to also reduce sound reflected into the room
and to take up your minor lumps and bumps in the room.
Also, if you've got a little bit of like grit,
which obviously the installer should be vacuuming and sweeping away.
But a hard surface onto a hard surface, it's going to sound quite crispy.
So that's just a little buffer in between.
So you got to understand and respect that a good quality
SPC generally has an IXPE underlay and some of the other options
have slightly cheaper underlays, which have no memory.
So once you've actually compressed it, it doesn't actually bounce back
when you remove that weight.
And that becomes a quite
integral component when you're exploring these products
and that's where you get that price variance.
And so you say, well, this is the same length, same thickness.
I don't understand where that price variance comes in?
That's where you start losing or gaining.
Okay, so that's basically what it's made of.
I think we need to look at the properties that are contained within the products.
SPC's being sold as a waterproof flooring system.
Technically speaking, it is water resistant
to about 99.9% from the top,
but from the bottom it is not waterproof. Flooring moisture can affect the floor
and can cause the floor to break down over a long period of time.
So when we said there's nothing else that needs to go underneath the floor,
we recommend a moisture barrier of some description,
be it a liquid of two poly epoxy.
That's the one,
plastic sheeting we personally as manufacturers
recommend is an 80 micron, low density polyethylene plastic virgin material.
But you can use the 200 micron HDPE, which is
high density. You listened last time, I'm impressed.
So there's these two options.
The thinner you go with the plastic,
the more chance you've got of breaking down
if there is a moisture problem under the floor.
But what the moisture does if it's left to eat into the calcium carbonate,
it basically breaks down the joint and your floor will fail
probably over a period of 15 months to two years.
And it's something that we never do in the industry is check for moisture
on an SPC product. On your stick down LVT,
there's a clear parameter of moisture must be below
3% before you can do a glue down vinyl. But SPC, everyone
saw it as a wonder product and thought,
you know what, let's just throw it down on anything.
And that's what they did.
And moisture came back in and both the board basically forced
it wasn't their product, but the whole industry has now stipulated
that you must must put plastic underneath or moisture barrier on the floor.
Also when you've got a slight variance in the pH of the concrete,
we don't know the variabilities
or the installer is not necessarily always testing the pH of that substrate
and that can over a period of time really impact the calcium carbonate composition.
And so that damp proof membrane really just safeguards the product,
the long term vapor emission from a slab which as we know,
some slabs can never dry out or take 100 years.
And so we need to put these caution cautionary measures in place
and plastic, it's cheap, it's inexpensive, but it is essential.