I am currently in the process of renovating a commercial space for my new grocery store.
The space is completely covered in carpet, but its the super thin, commercial carpet for high traffic.
I really want to put down wood vinyl plank flooring down, and was wondering if I could just lay it right over top of the carpet? Doing so would literally save us days of effort and thousands of dollars.
My worry is long term though, will having carpet underneath lead to any bad things a couple years down the line?
Like the fact that your high traffic flooring isn’t properly supported by a subfloor and is going to warp or split? When you have to clear out your store, rip up the flooring,and then tear out he carpet and lay a proper subfloor, I assure you it will take a lot more than “days of effort and thousands of dollars”.
When it comes to construction, and particularly commercial construction, it is a lot cheaper to do it right once than to have to redo it half-assed repeatedly.
Exactly, especially in a grocery situation where there’s going to be lots of food spills and other liquids. Also, no matter how thin the carpet, it’s going to soak up a lot of the glue, so you may end up needing a ton more of that to compensate, eating up some of your short-term savings. Regardless, it’s a disaster in the making.
While I don’t disagree with the general consensus that it’s a bad idea, vinyl plank flooring is nominally watertight because of the tongue-and-groove joins between each plank.
Also, it does not require glue; it’s designed to float on top of the substrate without glue. (It’s possible that for very large areas glue is recommended, but at least for ordinary domestic use, it can be laid down without any adhesives.)
I assumed that vinyl flooring being used in a high traffic commercial application would be commercial-grade vinyl sheet, which does have to be glued down but upon review I see the o.p. actually indicates that it is “wood vinyl plank flooring”. If that is in fact the case, the o.p. should probably first review the flooring selection with a manufacturer’s rep to make sure what he has selected is actually suitable for use. I do see planking used in some grocery applications, particularly in the produce section presumably to make it appear more “natural” (even though polyvinyl chloride is about the furtherest thing from nature) but most flooring is the easily installed and essentially zero maintenance sheet. Ordinary household vinyl plank is not intended for the kind of traffic or concentrated rolling weight of loaded grocery carts, and certainly not pallet jacks (if he is offloading directly from pallets) even with proper subfloor support.
Even if this is a boutique grocery (I’m assuming because it sounds as if it is in a non-anchor commercial space) and isn’t expected to handle full-sized grocery carts or pallet stocking, just the regular foot traffic will easily been 10X of a residential application, so you can expect flooring that is intended to last for 20 or 30 years in residential use to last for only 2 or 3. Of course, with the “super thin, commercial grade carpet” substrate, even the static loading of shelves would exacerbate damage. I’d be surprised if you’d get the shelves loaded up before you start seeing splitting.
As far as water, even if the carpet was treated to prevent fungal growth and the flooring is nominally watertight, for a commercial application where you will have spilled liquids, water dripping off of refrigeration coils, and a sprinkler fire suppression system, you do not want any place where water can collect underneath your flooring. Vinyl flooring and linoleum before that are nearly ubiquitous in commercial food service and grocery establishments because it is nearly impervious to casual water damage and can be laid down directly on finished and graded concrete, offering nowhere for a significant amount of water to build up or provide an environment for fungal growth. Linoleum tended to harden and eventually crack with age which is why you see old linoleum pucker up and eventually split; vinyl seems much more durable and can be easily recycled via solvent recovery methods.
I can’t add anything intelligent to this discussion: it’s all been laid out clearly above. Puting planks over carpet would be unstable and simply a case of cutting corners that would likely result in problems later.
I don’t know if it has been mentioned, but the moisture (that could easily mold the carpet) doesn’t have to come from above. It could come from below, like vapor drive up through the ground and through a concrete slab.
LVP started as a commercial product for very high pedestrian traffic applications - such as grocery stores. So yeah, this is a good choice for grocery stores. There is a wide scope of quality, some as cheap as laminate and some more expensive than high end engineered hardwood. The product does have to be rated for its application.
Depends on the lino. and how well its stuck down. If its hard as a rock, then its fine to put vinyl on. There were various underlay systems and various thickness and type of lino… foam lino could make too much squash effect.
If its not has hard and smooth as a modern MDF (waterproof chipboard) floor, so you wouldnt put vinyl planks over it .
For best results, they level a hard floor with a leveling liquid ( a very runny glue that dries solid. ) and that way the vinyl planks are completely smooth and feel flat to walk on. Otherwise, You can tell that there’s a sag in the floor when you walk through the doorway… it just feels “up” to the doorway. And anyway the sum of the sagging can make the planks separate.
So for a carpet floor, stick to lino , so it can’t separate, it won’t lever up on end when the other end sags, and it will stretch and adjust with the carpet below