How come laminate can be layed on the floor completely floating, but engineered wood needs to be nailed down, even when both use a locking system?
Engineered wood v. laminate question
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Doggit
It doesn't, and certainly shouldn't need to be if there's a click system. On a normal T&G system, you'd glue the top part of tha tounge, and that's all that's needed for a floating floor.
Oh, all the tutorials I found talked about nailing it down!
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Doggit
You nail it down to joists, but if there's a solid floor, then it can be floating, hence the click system. If there are joists, then you need normal length floorboards, not the small sizes that come in packs. But you can glue the pack types down rather than have them floating, but floating allows you to put an insulation type underlay down first.
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Yeah that makes sense (my floor is concrete).
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Doggit
Then I'd put some self levelling compound down, then 5mm fibreboard, and then engineered wood floor glued on top of the tounge so that the glue squashes out of the top.
I just discovered a damp patch in the middle of the concrete subfloor. I presume I can put down a black polythene DPM before the usual fibre underlay?
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Doggit
I'd be inclined to put a liquid DPM down (it won't move), but a 1200 gauge polyethylene DPM should be fine
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Not really, depend where is the damp from?
If it's just residual best to let it dry out first.
If it's a broken DPM then the floor will keep getting wetter until it is drying out as fast as it's rising into the floor, ie it comes out the edges. Depends if that's a problem.
I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't have a DPM. I think it leaches in through the gable end wall because the house has no DPC and the road level outside (gable end) it is pretty much at floor level or maybe worse. Not a lot I can do about that. I can't see the council digging up a road surface that has been that was for a century, for me.
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How is that better than polythene? Isn't it just and impermeable skin either way?
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You'd need to seal any DPM to the dpc, normally you lap the DPM across the wall with the dpc in the same layer and it's completely continuous.
In practice you may get away with it not sealed but I'm not sure where the water would manage to leave to be honest.
Edit old houses are complex beasts usually in balance in their early years, any modern interventions can upset that balance and cause dampness in the long term. You'd need someone with more experience than me!
In practice you may get away with it not sealed but I'm not sure where the water would manage to leave to be honest.
Edit old houses are complex beasts usually in balance in their early years, any modern interventions can upset that balance and cause dampness in the long term. You'd need someone with more experience than me!
might not be if you have serious amounts of water coming up, but if it is just a bit of vapour it will stop it actually getting to the surface and condensing, with polythene overlay if it actually gets to the surface it could just run on top of the slab under the polythene not necessarily a total problem but could for example wet the bottom of your plastered walls cause mold etc
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