Gallery of Costly Lessons
How much does it cost to have a moisture-related floor issue? It is the cost of the floor, the fix and the moving out to do it all, something every building owner and designer and builder are at-risk for.
Gallery of Floor Issues
Moisture is not the direct, sole cause of the problem. It is alkaline moisture, the kind that turns a tough, strong adhesive into a diluted mush.
Gallery of Floor Issues
A floor distress issue is not a single thing, but a "cascade of events" that takes placee, as in starting with no substrtate preparation and expecting adhesive to stick to a dirty surface.
Gallery of Floor Issues
In the "cascade of events" moisture vapor exiting floor joints leaves behind the salts it carried once in solution, depositing them under the tile where they dry, expand and exert upward force on the floor.
Gallery of Floor Issues
In many cases, the lifted corners become burnished by floor-car machines and friction burns off the top layer of the composition tile.
Gallery of Floor Issues
This vintage photo of a large well-known University was in the days when nobody "heard" of slab moisture. The problem has been an issue for decades.
Gallery of Floor Issues
In this cascade of events, the moisture here is not all from the slab. Initially, slab moisture started a de-bonding of the tile, followed by people trying to keep their floor clean and not knowing they have a cavity.
Gallery of Floor Issues
Some "slab moisture" problems are not concrete issues at all, but features. The straight line of these alkaline deposits makes finding an un-treaded joint easy.
Gallery of Floor Issues
Another example of the high pH moisture entrapped under a non-permeable floor.
Gallery of Floor Issues
Hard lump, soft air-filled blister or water-blister? Find out when you cut it open! Just don't puncture it hard with a screwdriver, fluid may hit the wall.
Gallery of Floor Issues
The late, great Joe Grady once said about covering a damp slab, "there is trouble ahead". Softened adhesive easily squeezes like toothpaste to the surface, confirming a legend's truth.
Gallery of Floor Issues
A fun but expensive experiement. Use a non-specified gypsum based patch because its cheap, and watch it expand due to chemical interactions with the damp slab.
PGallery of Floor Issues
Trip hazards, issues with floor care and therefore hygienics as well as logisitics, and just a plain ugly floor is the result of misunderstanding the issue.
Gallery of Floor Issues
A classic from Peter Craig, the center (brownish) floor is an old asbestos flooring. The black diagonal is the slab with cutback adhesive, and the white tile to the left and surround, is the new floor on top the old.
Gallery of Floor Issues
A layer of fiberglass glued with arylic to the slab to try and seal it. Only epoxy is capable of withstanding high alkalinity. Don't matter how much moisture a sealer or adhesive can withstand, its how high of pH.
Gallery of Floor Issues
The poor guys at the Roche Bros supermarket in New England got creative about their "wet floor" signs, they were so used to having problems.
Gallery of Floor Issues
Carpet tiles are like old felt-back vinyl floors flipped upside down. They are not permeable folks, and far more sensitive than sheet vinyl.
Gallery of Floor Issues
Moisture saturated this cementitious underlayment and so nicely dissolved the adhsesive with a 14 pH it made removing the floor easy for once.
Gallery of Floor Issues
Sometimes you can only patch the floor so much. The one thing people often misunderstand, is this is a time-issue problem, it does not happen in a day.
Gallery of Floor Issues
This is a heavy, vulcanized rubber floor about 1/4 inch in thickness. The blisters are about 12 inches long. Moisture does not do this, chemistry does. Contractors installing floors for people, should never be held liable for things they cannot control.
Gallery of Floor Issues
Heavy rubber floor mats are pretty tough, but moisture seeping out between joings can still be an issue if for no other reason than the cosmetics.
Gallery of Floor Issues
Shut down this store at 10pm, mask all the gondolas and merchandise, demo and remove as much flooring as you can, take it all down, clean up, reopen by 7am. Then 33 nights later, you fixed the floor.
Gallery of Floor Issues
Scars of moisture, tile joint lines often leave a pattern on the slab. Some think it is from cleaning fluids soaking in, but probably more likely from chemical differences in the slab from where moisture evaporated out versus where it stayed trapped.
Gallery of Floor Issues
This is a typical moisture distressed floor. It has not "failed" completely which is a subjective term, but nevertheless, its days are numbered.
Gallery of Floor Issues
High rolling loads on this floor pushed around a lot of emuslified adheisve mixed with slab moisture. This floor has a soft backing material to it which also has been destroyed.
Gallery of Floor Issues
The cascade here is the initial joint line ventillating moisture. As ventillation is allowed, the slab may not "dry out" but may even flow more freely at this open port to the air, amplifying the problem.
Gallery of Floor Issues
Agonizing to try and clean and keep attractive a supermarket floor, and more agonizing to shut down the store to fix it.
Gallery of Floor Issues
The worst case, a slab in "critical saturation" which is soaking wet, highly alkaline, making this sheet vinyl peel off like a huge buper sticker.
Gallery of Floor Issues
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