Bid Goodbye To Underlay With Luxury Vinyl
As exciting as it seems, a flooring project can sometimes feel like a huge undertaking, with the costs piling up quickly. Factoring in labour and the cost of underlay for most floors means stretching your budget further. This is where Luxury Vinyl flooring comes in to save the day.
Vinyl floors are, unsurprisingly, the fastest-selling and most preferred type of flooring today. Over the years, Luxury Vinyl has truly revolutionized the industry with its remarkably natural appearance, extreme versatility and hardwearing abilities. That’s not all. LV is far more affordable, easy and quick to install and comes packed with built-in benefits. This means that you can bid adieu to all the additional flooring aids needed for traditional floors. And that includes the underlay.
What exactly is an underlay?
The underlay is essentially a thin material sandwiched between the subfloor and the new floor covering. The underlay is a must in most flooring options, including carpet, to give the floor additional stability, cushioning and all-too-necessary properties like moisture and impact resistance. It is also imperative to use an underlay for thermal insulation in most floors.
But the evolutions in luxury vinyl have thankfully rendered it unnecessary.
Why Luxury Vinyl Flooring doesn’t need one
If you’ve just purchased a luxury vinyl floor, you must be wondering if you need to invest in an underlay. The good news is, you don’t. Thanks to the cutting-edge advancements in vinyl flooring, the underlay is finally a component you can do without. Thus reducing your costs drastically.
The distinctive design of vinyl flooring is such that it comes packed with a strong, built-in base layer of an underlay. In general, luxury vinyl flooring is exceptionally stable and does not warp, wobble or buckle under pressure. If you choose to install an underlay for vinyl flooring, you in fact, increase the risk of damage to the floor by making it too soft and wobbly.
What kind of underlay are we talking about?
Different types of vinyl flooring have different types of underlay built into its structure – ranging from cork, felt, plywood to foam. For unrivalled performance though, Pro-Tek™’s range of Luxury Vinyl flooring has a robust IXPE foam underlayment embedded into its core. Years of R&D and the most rigorous stress tests have helped perfect the underlay, to enhance the waterproofing and impact-resistant qualities of the floors, while making them feel comfortable underfoot. IXPE foam is a lightweight, tough and resilient material which is perfect for keeping vinyl planks thin, yet strong.
To ensure that they stand the test of time, all Pro-Tek™ floors have a sturdy multi-layer construction:
– An IXPE foam underlay
– An SPC or WPC layer for additional water-resistance
– A top veneer mimicking natural materials
– A protective wear layer that prevents scratches and scuffs
All of these thoughtfully added layers make sure that our LVP/LVT flooring goes the extra mile without any hidden costs along the way.
What is IXPE Foam and how does it work?
IXPE or Irradiated Cross-Linked PolyEthelene, is a breakthrough advancement in foam technology. This cutting-edge material is made up of high-density, closed-cell foam of polyethylene, the same material used to make juice bottles, medicine containers, and rescue floats, to name just a few. It creates a tight, smooth surface that makes the floor waterproof and highly insulating. It has the ability to bounce back to form after compression, which means you can subject your floor to all kinds of impact and it’ll still hold its shape for years.
Below are just some of the ways in which IXPE foam underlay makes Pro-Tek™’s luxury vinyl floors stronger than ever:
Superior waterproofing
The IXPE underlay makes our LV floors 100% water and moisture proof, and impervious to mildew, mould, rot, and bacteria. Even in places or conditions where significant amounts of water exposure or spillage is expected, the IXPE foam underlay works hard to not let it penetrate your floors. Whatever the weather is like – sticky hot or clammy cold, your floors will not let you feel it. Whether it’s a bathroom with kids splashing around wildly or a humid restaurant kitchen at peak hours – you can count on your floor to hold it all together.
Noise-absorbing
IXPE provides great acoustic performance as opposed to every other material of underlay. Loud, late-night music from the neighbours below will not bother you anymore, with the underlay absorbing the sound and making it much softer.
Enhanced thermal insulation
The dense, tightly-packed, closed-cell structure of IXPE gives it exceptional insulation properties. Whether you have an underfloor heating system or a more conventional one, the IXPE Foam underlay keeps the heat from escaping and can significantly reduce your heating bills.
Time-tested technology
IXPE technology has been around for years and has been used to great success in the medical, automobile and hospitality industries. It is considered an indispensable material for its tensile strength and incredible properties. As a result, it’s a technology that has undergone stringent research and can be trusted to work in every possible condition. This also means that our floors last much longer, allowing us to offer you a lifetime guarantee on some of our best-sellers.
In the past, when it came to cases where the subfloor was uneven or damaged, underlays were also used under vinyl to even out the subfloor. But with Pro-Tek(™)’s unique click-lock system, you do not even need to prepare your subfloor for installation anymore. Simply click the planks in place – which again means no underlays and zero prep needed.
You will find that Pro-Tek™ luxury vinyl floors are the dream floor you were looking for, ticking all the boxes for you. It makes shopping for floors so much more affordable and enjoyable. If you want to learn more about how our floors can serve you for years, we are always a phone call or message away.