Joe Versluis
The following are excerpts from an article that was sent by Joe Versluis, national sales manager for U.S. Products, a manufacturer of hot-water carpet extractors.
With the economy picking up, many building owners and managers are considering building new facilities or taking on renovation projects they have postponed for a few years. One of the issues they will likely confront in the process is whether to install hard-surface flooring or carpets.
Historically, choosing between carpets and hard-surface flooring in facilities has been more of a design issue than anything else. There have been times when carpeting is “in” and hard-surface flooring is “out,” and of course the reverse happens as well.
Today, and at least for now, trends seem to indicate that hard-surface flooring is once again becoming the preferred floor covering.
This may be because some hard-surface flooring is often less expensive than carpet, and hard-surface floors are believed to be less expensive to maintain overall. While the first reason may be true in some cases, the Carpet and Rug Institute (CRI) disputes the claim that hard-surface flooring is cheaper to maintain. According to CRI, over time it can be as much as 65% less expensive to maintain a carpeted floor compared to a hard-surface floor. CRI bases this on the amount of time, labor, and supplies required to strip, clean, refinish, and maintain hard-surface floors. Additionally, CRI suggests that hard-surface flooring requires 2.5 times more cleaning than carpets on an annual basis.
Beyond costs, there are other arguments that can be made in favor of carpeting, and one that should be in every building owner/manager’s mind is health. A study recently released by Airmid Healthgroup Limited, a leading biomedical research organization, reports that when compared to hard-surface flooring, properly maintained carpets (cleaned using high-performance vacuums and hot-water extractors) can trap foreign allergens that could have potential negative health impacts. This process also helps improve the overall air quality in a facility.
Other health-related benefits of carpeting have been studied and reported, with most studies coming to the same conclusion as the Airmid Healthgroup study. For instance, a 2008 study, “Carpet, Asthma and Allergies—Myth or Reality,” by Dr. Mitchell W. Sauerhoff, found that carpeting has the ability to hold and trap contaminants, a feature not possible with hard-surface floors. The study referred to this ability as “sequestering.”
Further, one of the first studies on the health impact of carpeting was reported nearly two decades ago. The Research Triangle Institute and the University of North Carolina reported that according to their research, although a carpeted floor may have higher concentrations of biocontaminants compared to a same-sized tiled floor, amounts of airborne contaminants—those that get released into the air and may be inhaled by building users—were higher over tiled floors than over carpet.
There are other reasons building owners/managers should consider carpeting when restoration or renovation work is being performed in their facilities. Among them are the following:
Noise: It is well known that carpet can reduce noise levels. What is less known is just how much it can do so. According to BuildDirect, marketers of hard and soft flooring materials, carpet has a noise reduction coefficient (NRC) rating of .40–.50, making it the most efficient sound-absorbing material available. Vinyl, cork, and rubber also have fairly high NRC ratings, but not as high as carpet. Stone floors were reported to be at the bottom of the scale for sound absorption.
Safety: Slip and fall accidents account for about one million injuries each year in the United States, and many of these occur in commercial facilities. While there are slip and fall accidents on carpet, these typically involve tripping over a cord or an object on the carpet, tripping on a torn or bulging area in the carpet, or possibly slipping on a carpet that is still wet after cleaning. Most slip and fall accidents occur on hard-surface floors, making carpets significantly safer for building users
