Altro Invent Retailer’s Dream Safety Floor

Sometimes sales reps will wind we retailers up a little with an amusing anecdote, a joke straight out of a 1978 edition of ‘The Comedians’ or even a tie that their wife bought them for their birthday. However, every now and then they will try to pull your leg about a product.

When I saw Altro’s new safety floor, Xpresslay TM, I was definitely suspecting the worst…..

Very briefly, if you don’t already know, commercial safety floor has to be fully adhered to a prepared subfloor. Damp measurements need to be taken and great care must be taken with the preparatory work. The vast majority of problems on jobs like this seem to occur because of poor, or non-existent preparation.

What Altro have come with here is a new safety floor that does not have to be fully adhered in the traditional way. Instead the idea is that you use Altro’s double sided tape around the seams and perimeter to stick it down….and it works! You would still need to fully stick it if very heavy items were to be rolled across it for example, but generally speaking, taping will work on the majority of applications.

More intriguingly though, Altro have developed a product here that can be fitted on top of old vinyl floors, so you don’t need to hack up the old flooring. This is because there can of course be no ‘plasticiser migration’ as they call it. There is no adhesive used that will interact with the surface of the old tiles – genius!

Also you can fit it on top of underfloor heating without even turning it off and also you can begin to weld it immediately. Add to that the fact that you can fit this product on fresh concrete that has a RH (relative humidity) of up to 97% and you have a wonderfully flexible solution that will solve a lot of problems quickly and easily.

Let’s step back from the technical stuff for a moment though and think about what this means. To me personally, it is a great addition because we aren’t specialist safety floor/commercial contractors – we get a handful of these jobs every now and then and this product will now be our first choice to show customers.

It means we don’t have to worry about costly and time-consuming preparation, moisture testing and it is quicker for us to install, so our fitters are tied up for less time. All this will translate into a better experience for our customer and a more competitive finished price. Sure, there are many cheaper safety floors around, but Xpresslay TM is not especially expensive by industry standards and its features and benefits make up for any price differential. If a comparable safety floor is £3 per square metre less, then that is going to be easily eaten up (and a lot more) in prep work. Xpresslay TM wins hands down for me.

For the specialists, it will be one of many solutions they offer, but to the many many retailers who do the odd job in safety floor, this is a dream product. Full marks to Altro.

(Originally posted on the 24th July 2010)

Tarkett Spectrum: New Safety Floor Tile

I won’t pretend that commercial and contract flooring is my forte, but as a small retailer we do our fair share of jobs in commercial premises and they are always varied and bring a different set of challenges to our usual domestic work.

Recently we were asked to fit a small area of around 30 square metres in a safety floor. As chance would have it I was leafing through a trade magazine (yes, even this trade has dedicated magazines for it), when I noticed an ad for a new idea – a safety floor in tile form. There are several huge advantages to this to my mind. Firstly you don’t need to weld, saving time, hassle and expense. Secondly the transportation of these things is simple – rolls of safety floor are heavy and frequently need to go into fairly inaccessible areas, so another big thumbs up for these and thirdly, the quality of the tiles themselves is excellent. Tarkett’s manufacturing is definitely something we can trust and rely upon for stock in depth and a high level of quality control.

When you handle a tile you immediately notice just how pliable and easy to work with this stuff is. When you compare it with its closest roll competition from Polyflor and Altro, it seems to win out in that regard.

It has an impressive colour palette (not all colours are available in tile format) and of course meets all the relevant standards from use in commercial areas where occassional spillages may occur. This is not wet room flooring, but would be fine for example in a toilet of a bar or restaurant or similar. The tile format also enables the possibility of mixing colours easily and quickly to create patterned effects. Tarkett demonstrate this effectively with this image:

Innovation in Safety Floor

Keep an eye out for it, I think it’s going to be a big seller.

(Originally posted on 16th June 2009)