When people speak of putting in a Pergo floor, they are quick to mention it’s ona floating floor. What the heck does that mean? What other types of floors use a floating floor? For example, if Pergo is not aka laminant floor, does a laminant flooring material need a floating floor, too? Tell me all about it!
Doesn’t this mean it’s not nailed or glued down to whatever is beneath it, just snapped together on top?
According to one site:
Why? We just put in a tile floor with Wonderboard sub-flooring atop the plywood. What’s the big deal about fixing (vs. not fixing) the subflooring to the sub, subflooring? Is a floating floor required for Pergo? And if so, why? Does a floating floor save time/money? If not, what is the advantage…???
Pergo is approx 3/16 thick. it would split if you tried to nail it down.
Our house is a slab floors. To nail down a wood floor would require building up the floor first with plywood first. With a floating floor did not require the build up.
A floating floor is less likely to crack with shifts in the house.
The primary advantage is ease of removal. If you damage your floor, getting a wood floor off can be very difficult if it is glued or nailed (I have heard of people who have to use powered chisels-jackhammers-to get glued floors up). I like my floating floor because it was easier to keep straight. At least that is what I was told by the installers. If you glue down part of your floor and there is a slight distortion or angle to the grooves, it is hard to compensate for. So I was told. Floating floors allow the installer to concentrate on getting the entire floor straight and parallel. Any minor errors are pushed to the edge and hidden under the wall. There is a slight give or bounce to the floor which may or may not be an advantage depending on your tastes.
Wood expands and shrinks with changes in humidity. With a floating floor, it doesn’t have to have gaps between boards. There’s a gap at the walls that grows and shrinks, but it’s covered by the baseboard.
We have a Bruce wood floor, with all the planks nailed in. There are small gaps between the boards in winter, and not summer.
I’ve never heard of a floating tile floor. Probably a Bad Idea. ETA: Also, tile doesn’t grow and shrink like wood does. ETA2: Wood expands and shrinks perpendicular to the wood grain. Plywood is more stable since it has grain alternating direction from ply to ply.
Expansion and contraction is the reason for floating floors. Interlocking floors can not shrink a little between each board because the pieces lock into a solid unit. The finished floor is one solid piece and and the expansion and contractions in size from one end to the other would cause stress that would crack or buckle the floor if nailed down too.
Looking at Pergo’s site and reading their installation instructions, I would say that the Pergo floor itself is a floating floor, it is not on a floating floor. It is interlocking pieces that you butt together without fastening to the subfloor. It’s synthetic so probably isn’t prone to expansion/shrinkage to the degree that wood is.
Actually, if one believes Holmes on Homes, tile needs to be semi-floating. The primary reason for this is that in past eras, tile was set atop a solid concrete subfloor . Today, it’s more often than not laid with thin-set mortar on half-inch cement board screwed to 5/8" plywood underlayment - far more flexible than a few inches of concrete.
He’s a big proponent of using a material called Ditrabetween the subfloor and the tile. The stuff helps isolate the brittle tile from structural shifts and seasonal expansion/contraction cycles.
My brother-in-law and I installed a wood laminate floating floor over the existing linoleum in the kitchen of my mother’s house a couple of years ago. We purchased the flooring at the local Walmart.
The installation was quick and easy by the two of us (total amateurs) and the results looked really nice. When we sold mom’s house a couple of years later the kitchen floor still looked very nice.
Tile needs to be insulated from movement that is bound to occur. Do not confuse this with "Flexible’. As far as we non-engineers are concerned, tile is not flexible. It still is best to have minimum deflection. Zero deflection would be best.
What should be allowed to happen, given proper installation techniques, is that lateral movement of the subsurfaces and some cracking (which is part of some lateral movement) in subsurfaces does not immediately get transmitted to the decorative tile at the top (the floor). If the tile is locked in step with the cement substrate, which is locked in step with the substrate below that, everything gets transmitted.
So, it’s not about ‘flexible’. We don’t want flexible tile, because it cracks – well, it cracks because it has minimal ability to flex. So, we can’t have it as a goal until such material exists. We want the tile ridged, and not deflecting. We want the subfloor and cement to tolerate some lateral movement without every stitch of it becoming cracks in the tile.
For floors that need to move, we let them: Floating floors. Also, let a floor float if anchoring it to the subfloor does nothing but add cost and squeaks.