Q: We want to float a floor in our basement over a cement slab, but can’t tell when looking through all the products out there, which are recommended for below grade installation? I know in our local home shop they have them on display by grade (above/below) but when looking on line I can’t seem to find where that’s indicated in the product description. Any helpful tips you can supply to help us find the right product?
Thank you,
Debbie
A: The easiest way here is to look for any floor which is floating. Basically you need to look for laminate, engineered hardwoods, and cork flooring. There is one exception to this which would be 5/16″ solid hardwood floors, but they must be glued down as they can not float. Due to the moisture concerns in basements, certain floors can not be installed because they are not dimensionally stable enough, but floors which can be glued down or installed floating are good for basements.
Before installing engineered flooring perform
a moisture test using a CM-device and should not exceed the following moisture level; for cement based concrete 2%CM, for anhydrite concrete 0.5%CM