Understand Laminate Floor, Vinyl Floor and High End Resilient Flooring

Today laminate flooring, vinyl flooring and high end resilient flooring (HERF) have become some of the popular flooring options in Singapore; they portrays a cost effective flooring material as compared to ceramic tiles, wooden parquet as well as the expensive stones flooring like marble.

Some consumers may often get confused between these three types of floor. So, let's look at the difference.

Laminate Flooring

Laminate flooring, is made up of compressed wood flooring with a layer of photographed design on the top surface. For most common laminate flooring, the wear layer is coated with aluminium oxide to enhance its scratch resistance. Most good quality laminate flooring comes with good safety and health standard such as E1 Formaldehyde emission and slip resistance. However, one of the common problem that laminate flooring experienced will be the water issue. Hence, home owners will need to take extra care when dealing with them.

Vinyl Flooring 

Like laminate flooring, vinyl flooring is also manufactured massively. However, the materials that used to manufactured vinyl flooring is resin and not compressed wood. Vinyl flooring all along has been installed in hospitals and industry institution due to its flat surface layer and anti-static effect. One of the toughest challenge of installing vinyl flooring is that you required a complete flat subfloor to install it. Most vinyl flooring requires glue during installation. And when water seeped through, the adhesive might lose its 'stickiness' to hold the flooring.

However, as technology advances, vinyl flooring is evolved into a glueless installation approach. With the introduction of luxury vinyl tiles, (luxury resilient flooring), properties may not require any glue to install such vinyl flooring.

High End Resilient Flooring 

High end resilient flooring is considered as a group slightly higher than the family of traditional resilient flooring which consist of vinyl flooring, linoleum and rubberised flooring, due to its higher specifications. It is a strong substitute to traditional laminate flooring and wood parquet due to its 100% waterproof feature and wood alike features.

It is different from conventional vinyl flooring as it has a better wear layer. Though both vinyl flooring and high end resilient flooring has comparable slip resistant properties; good quality high end resilient flooring is often tested for volatile organic compound to test for good indoor quality. 

Since both 'glueless' vinyl floor and high end resilient floor may appear to have similar properties, to find out whether the flooring is exactly high end resilient flooring or normal vinyl flooring, home owners may need to check whether the surface layer is made up of ceramic beaded coating or not. Moreover, another method is to spot for unnecessary smell. Good quality high end resilient floor is usually odourless as compared to the lower quality ones.

In summary,

it is important for the consumer to be educated about the difference between laminate flooring, vinyl flooring as well as high end resilient flooring, so as to make a better decision in their flooring shopping experience.