Moisture meters, sometimes referred to as damp meters, are immensely useful tools for checking moisture in flooring materials. With a damp meter for flooring, you can accurately assess the moisture content of flooring wood, helping guide your flooring installation decisions.
Using damp meters for flooring can provide several benefits, including:
1: Providing Verifiable, Hard Data About Your Flooring Installation
On some jobs, having thorough documentation is a must. With a damp tester for flooring, you can check the %MC values of your flooring wood, the subfloor materials, and even other nearby building materials for the presence of excess moisture.
By recording these readings (either manually or using a built-in reading storage feature if your device has one), you can provide documentation that you exercised sound reasoning and exercised all due caution on a flooring job.
2: Prevention of Mold Growth & Delamination
Excess moisture in flooring wood can cause more problems than just deforming the wood. In severe cases, it can lead to the growth of mold and the delamination of certain wood products such as oriented strand board (OSB) and plywood subfloor materials.
Mold growth can pose a respiratory health risk to a building’s occupants. Additionally, it can eat away at wood and other building materials, compromising structural integrity over time.
Delamination of OSB and plywood subfloors can pose another problem, as this distorts the subfloor. This can weaken the flooring, or cause it to become deformed.
Both of these issues can be caused by the presence of excess moisture in flooring materials.
By using a damp meter for flooring, you can check the subfloor for hidden pockets of moisture that can promote mold growth and delamination, helping ensure the integrity and reliability of your work.
3: Avoiding Callbacks
By detecting excess moisture and remediating it before it can cause an issue, you can avoid expensive, time-wasting callbacks on flooring jobs. This can save you significant amounts of time, labor, and material on ripping up compromised flooring and redoing all of the installation work all over again.
This turns your damp meter for flooring into a powerful insurance plan against callbacks that can more than justify the price of purchase in short order.
The above benefits are just a few of the reasons why damp-detecting moisture meters are an indispensable tool for flooring professionals.
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