Wood Moisture Meter: A Simple Way to Avoid Callbacks
Check the moisture conditions of hardwood flooring installation
When installing hardwood flooring, use a wood moisture meter such as a TechScan needle free gauge to check the moisture content (% MC) of the wood before installation. Needle free instruments are particularly good tools for checking hardwood flooring, as they can measure in these materials without leaving unsightly pinholes.
Using a needle free instrument, you only need to press the scanning board onto the sample material, read and repeat the process until you obtain enough readings from different samples of hardwood flooring to ensure the correct installation range of% MC.
Check the bottom floor
In addition to simply checking the moisture content of the hardwood flooring you are installing, it is also necessary to check the moisture content of the bottom layer where your hardwood flooring is installed.
Why? Because even if the% MC of your top layer is good, building on a damp bottom floor can still cause problems because excess moisture from one material can seep into another.
For the subfloor, the type of instrument you use will vary depending on the type of subfloor you have. For wooden flooring, both needle free and needle free hygrometers are useful. Needle free gauges are perfect for quickly assessing large areas of underlying flooring, while needle gauges can help you accurately locate the depth of moisture pockets. In fact, many contractors use two types of instruments when inspecting wood.
Adapt Sure Wood to the environment
When preparing to install wooden flooring, it is important to ensure that the wooden materials you are using are properly domesticated. Different regions in the United States have varying levels of environmental humidity, which in turn means that wood materials will reach their equilibrium moisture content (EMC) at different% MC levels by region.
Even in the same area, different buildings may have different humidity conditions due to the owners operating their HVAC systems in different environments. Therefore, it is important to adapt the wooden flooring inside the building to the environment in the days before installation.
To check if your wooden flooring has reached its building condition EMC, please use a moisture meter to check the% MC of the wood every day for a few days. When the moisture reading no longer fluctuates from one day to the next, your wood has reached the EMC environment and is ready for installation.
It is important to ensure that the HVAC system is running and set up for daily operations of the building once it is completed, while adapting to the wood. In this way, you can ensure that the wood is not exposed to significantly different climates after installation, as it absorbs or seeps moisture to achieve balance with the surrounding environment, which may cause expansion or contraction.
Before installing hardwood flooring, using a hygrometer to check if the wood and underlying flooring materials are properly adapted can help ensure that you don't have to go through time-consuming and expensive adjustments.
