If you are considering installing hardwood flooring at a conservatory there are a couple things that you’d gain from bearing in mind. Conservatories are excellent spaces for relaxing, enjoying time together with friends or to utilize within an inspirational office or research. Nevertheless, choosing hardwood flooring for your own conservatory means that you want to earn your flooring choices only a small bit more closely than you are in a number of the different rooms in the house.
By it’s very nature, a conservatory is generally built mostly in glass at least three sides (and very often overhead too ), meaning that a part of its enjoyment is the fact that it is sometimes a real sun trap. While being a suntrap is an enormous incentive because of its owners, the very simple fact that conservatories are actual suntraps can pose real challenges when it comes to hardwood flooring.
Why? Because suntraps mean high temperatures at particular times of day and (frequently ) the lack of insulation offered by glass can signify that temperatures can drop dramatically overnight. It is that this fluctuation in temperatures which poses the best problem for timber flooring as opposed to the highs or the lows themselves.
When temperatures on your conservatory rise, the air gets drier, which means that wood floors naturally give up moisture into the air. When temperatures fall again, the exact same flooring will take in moisture. While ordinary humidity levels do not in themselves cause a significant problem, extreme humidity fluctuations can lead to damage. One of the things you’ll see at a really basic level is your floor, as it expands and contracts (because of the humidity and temperature changes) will create gaps between the boards. These openings will appear and disappear at various times.
It is in order to minimise those issues that we recommend engineered wood flooring for setup in conservatories. Merely to clarify, these are the vital differences between engineered and solid wood flooring. Engineered wooden floorboards comprise of layers of different kinds of timber and are topped by hardwood. They are not made of solid wood. Typically they’re constructed using a combination of plywood, softwood and hardwood. Strong timber or real wood (because it’s sometimes called) on the flip side, as the name implies is made from solid wood. It is made completely out of hard wood and reacts more strongly to fluctuations in humidity and temperature than engineered wood flooring. It’s because of this that we advocate installing engineered rather than solid hardwood floors in conservatories.
Aside from picking engineered timber flooring for stability reasons on your conservatory, it’s also worth introducing an ultra violet (UV) end to your flooring equation to minimise the damage brought on by the strong sunlight it will appear against.
