I have some customer friends who purchased prefinished Kempas flooring and had it installed. It was a beautiful floor too but it is now shrunk down to the point that there are many gaps of 1/8 inch between the 3 5/8″ planks and the floor is becoming slightly loose and squeaky. They had the wood in the home for several weeks before it was laid and the joints were nice and tight when laid. The flooring dealer says that the humidity in the home is at 31 percent and that he checked the moisture in the flooring and plywood underlayment at less than 6 percent?? He suggests raising the humidity in the home to 50 percent and waiting two to three months for a reinspection. The homeowners are wanting to address this problem and complete their cabinet work so that they can enjoy their project. The home is equipped with a humidifier which seems to be working properly. I am thinking that this flooring either had an excessive moisture content when it arrived at the home or was improperly dried to begin with (possibly case hardened?). The gapping is pretty even throughout. I am quite skeptical that the humidity change reccommended will have much effect and I think that this floor will have to be replaced to fix the problem. It seems kind of cruel to make the homeowners wait for months to make this decision. Has anyone here had similar problems?? What do you flooring guys think about this? If reccommended by the dealer the Mfr. will send an independent inspector to check it, but by reccommending the months of waiting scheme the dealer has effectively consigned the homeowners to hiring their own inspector or delaying their whole project for months. I wil have a conversation with the dealer (the mfr. too) but I’d like first to get as much insight as possible from all of you.
Edited 3/25/2006 2:30 pm ET by bigfootnampa
Replies
Did anyone use a moisture meeter to check the actual MC of the wood before it was laid?
When they had the wood in the home before installation ... where was it? In the garage? Inside the house?
"When asked if you can do something, tell'em "Why certainly I can", then get busy and find a way to do it." T. Roosevelt
Inside the house. It was in the rooms where it was laid. As far as I know there was no moisture meter check before it was laid.
We have always been told to acclimate materials like flooring. This means that the packages get opened and the material gets spread out. One problem with this, especially on new construction, is that humidity levels can be very high. A floor installed during the fall, new drywall, paint, framing, shipped from who knows what warehouse, during what weather, can suffer once the heat goes on and stays on. I don't know if Kempas is an engineered product or solid wood. 5" solid would have me signing a waiver before I installed it, anything over radiant heat makes me nervous also. I think the only way to deal with these issues is to have a hygrometer on the job and use a good moisture meter. At least you can know what the existing conditions are but you can't control what happens afterwards. I'd contact Kempras and see what they say about the problem. Can you blame an installer for the product, if installation procedures were followed?
Beat it to fit / Paint it to match
In this case it was really impractical to lay the flooring out of the packages as it was over 1500 square feet and would have filled the entire home. this addition was finished and enclosed and heated for months before the flooring was installed. Kempas is solid wood, a species, not a brand. I do not suggest that it was the installers fault, I suspect that it was improperly dried lumber. There is no radiant heat in the building. Do you have any suggestions as to what to do to get an accurate moisture reading on the wood without being too intrusive? As I explained in the original post the mfrs. have been contacted.
Hammer; I was mistaken about the plank size. It is 3 5/8" (I edited the original post). There was a sample of 5" plank and I guess I remembered that but the final floor was laid in 3 5/8".
big... get a moisture meter and probe the rest of the wood in the house..
if the floor joists and the interior door trim are all at 6%, then no way is the flooring at fault..
also... it is probably not ever going to swell back to uniform tightness... more like ununiform tightness.. with gaps in one location and swelling in another
i'm constantly running into homeowners who think their interior woodwork was sub-par, only to point out to them that their interior humidiity is dangerously low
Mike Smith Rhode Island : Design / Build / Repair / Restore
Edited 3/25/2006 3:09 pm ET by MikeSmith
That's the situation with a house I worked on. 8000SF used as an occasional weekend home, left for weeks at a time at 65 degrees and then cranked up to 80 when they stay for a few days. It's moving the trimwork and creating a lifetime employment situation for the painter.
Mike would you consider a relative humidity of 31 percent "dangerously low"? Thanks for the tip on checking the moisture in the other woods in the house. They seem to have no problems with any of the other woods including some oak flooring that I laid on a stair landing at about the same time as the Kempas was installed. It has not gapped at all.
no.... 31 % to 50 % would be fine... but , how was it measured ?
sling psychrometer , RH meter ?
one time... or over a period of time ?
i'd like some probe samples of different woods in the house.. and some average RH readingsMike Smith Rhode Island : Design / Build / Repair / Restore
Mike; The figure of 31 percent was measured by the flooring dealer... a one time momentary sampling, by what instrument I do not know. The homeowners have since acquired a hygrometer and overnight testing reads 40 per cent which is probably more accurate.
Try taking a look at the wood movement calculator at the link below. With some playing around with the numbers you can get an idea of how much moisture was in the wood to begin with compared to what is there now.
http://justwoodworking.com/software/wood_move.php
Thanks Scott, according to that calculator it appears that the wood has lost more than 10 percent moisture content at this point (which indicates excessive moisture content to begin with.
"Stability: Kempas is less stable than red oak and in very dry climates prone to shrinking. Care must be taken to properly equalize this specie before installation."
http://www.wflooring.com/Technical_Info/Species_Tech_Info/Species_Pages/kempas.htm