A lot comes down to your own personal choice and preferences when deciding whether you should go for LVT flooring or laminate flooring. However, there are some differences in the properties of luxury vinyl tiles and laminate that may alter and influence your choices for specific rooms in the home or work place. Regardless of your tastes, you may decide that LVT is good for one room, whereas an alternative is the best choice for another. To help you to decide which is the best kind of flooring for you, let’s look at the differences and properties of both.
What is the Best Flooring for Me?
When it comes to cost, both types are comparable and any prices can depend entirely on the choice of design, make and supplier that you get them from. However, there are some factors that may make vinyl flooring more cost effective than laminate. Other things to consider is not only ‘which flooring is best for me’, but what suits the needs of the entire family, or business. For example, in your home, do you have small children, or do you have any pets? You will also need to consider what room your flooring is for.
One other factor to consider when choosing is the environmental impact of vinyl (plastic) verses wood laminate flooring.
Wood Laminate Flooring
Laminate flooring has been extremely popular for a number of decades and this is mostly due to its durability while giving the same effect and look as natural wooden boards. Laminate is made up of layers and has a wood core, with a picture of wood or tile on its top surface. Wood laminate flooring is also laminated with aluminium oxide, a clear coat that allows you to see the pattern underneath. This substance is actually the 4th hardest known to man, making laminate the most resilient to scratches, knocks and bumps. This is ideal if you have young ones that want to play and run around.
However, if laminate is damaged in any way, it can be hard to replace. This is because of its click-in-place set up, and design. This installation method makes it very easy to put down, but very hard to replace individual boards without unclicking and taking up all the boards, plus any beading or skirting that makes up the edging. Laminate is also known as a floating floor, meaning it is not fixed to the sub-floor surface.
Laminate flooring is not waterproof. Although you can get laminate that is better for kitchens and bathrooms, most laminate cannot cope with extreme wet conditions such as flooding. For example, if your dishwasher or washing machine suffers a leak, it can still get to the wooden materials that laminate flooring is constructed from, and warp and bend the boards, making them distorted and possibly damaging others in the process.
Luxury Vinyl Tiles
As mentioned above LVT flooring stands for luxury vinyl tiles and is also made up of layers. However, the core is made from a form of plastic: PVC. You can also get click-in-place vinyl boards that are easy to install, but have the same associated issues as laminate when you need to replace a damaged board. The fact the vinyl is more pliable can make it slightly easier to replace without removing any of the other tiles, as you may be able to play with it and bend it into place. However, there are no guarantees with this. Other types of vinyl flooring are known as loose lay which means they are fixed directly to the floor rather than clicking to each other, using an adhesive created specifically for these tiles.
Although this is not as scratch resistant as wood laminate flooring, the beauty of the loose lay LVT flooring is that, should have any damage to a board, it is easy to replace. In fact, the glues that are used for luxury vinyl tiling can be heated up making the glue let go of the tile, so that you can easily peel it away from the surface it is fixed to, and replace it.
It is also not likely to suffer any water damage as these tiles are water resistant. Water can still get under you flooring and damage a wooden sub-floor surface, but the vinyl itself is water resistant, making it ideal for the kitchen, bathrooms, toilets or any facility rooms.
Only the Best Flooring
All of our choices of flooring are always from reputable companies and offer we the best choice for your home and workplace. So, whatever you decide to have installed, or for further information contact ASC Flooring Ltd, your suppliers and installation experts.