Click Together vs Tongue and Groove Flooring

Many customers come in the store (Seattle simpleFLOORS) asking about click together hardwood and bamboo flooring. Dave put together a simple explanation for them to help understand the differences.

Click Together vs Tongue and Groove Flooring

Click together flooring is becoming more prevalent recently in the flooring industry. However do not let the marketing gimmicks that a lot of manufacturers have been dishing out fool you. The most common theme is that click together floors are much easier for installation. For a professional installer who uses the same lock system frequently, this may make installation 20% quicker. But for the average home owner click together floors typically take as long as or longer than standard tongue and groove. This is because a lot of the time when one is tapping the board into the next board, boards from previous rows comes loose. Ultimately a lot of people end up using blue painters tape just as they would if they were using glue with a tongue and groove system. The biggest fault on click together floors is that they force the installer to do a floating installation only. Certainly some people want to do a nail/staple or glue down applications. The locking systems used in click together floors do not hold as well as glue-together tongue and groove floors either. Thus they are not as “flexible” when in situations where there is a lot of expansion and contraction and will fail much easier. It is also not recommended to sand and refinish click together floors because the belt sanders put a lot of pressure on the lock system. This can loosen the lock system and leave gaps in between boards.

Tongue and groove floors tend to be cheaper as well. Flooring manufacturers typically pay between 8 to 15 cents per linear foot to use one of the two patented lock systems that must be used. This adds up quickly over the course of even a couple rooms. Tongue and groove floors that have been floated will not squeak due to the locking system loosening up. Also, tongue and groove floors that have been floated will provide much better moisture protection from spills and such. The glue acts as a barrier and does not allow the moisture to get under the flooring nearly as easy. When choosing your next flooring, please do not let the marketing gimmicks of some manufacturers sway you on making your correct choice.

Favorite Flooring Flavor of the Week - Jan

Favorite Flooring Flavor of the Week

Name- Jan Charles · simpleFLOORS eSales

Favorite Flooring Product- Cork, Cobblestone

Collection- Enviro-Cork

Wood Species- Cork Flooring

Color/Name- Cobblestone

Qualities/Specs-

Thickness: 3/8"
Width: 11 4/5"
Length: 35 1/2"

I go over: Both concrete or wooden subfloors
I can be: Floated
I am: Click Lock Cork

Use: Residential/Commercial

Green: Yes
Tongue & groove type: Glueless locking 4 sided tongue and groove

Edge design: Squared

Finish: Poly Urethane

Gloss level: Matte

Construction: Top has high-density 1/8” thick cork surface. Center has high-density fiberboard core made from recycled post-production waste. Bottom has a 2mm layer of high-density cork underlayment.

Installation rating: Easy

Structural placement: Above, Below and on Grade

Radiant heat: Yes

Warranty: 25 year wear warranty/lifetime structural

Why is that flooring my favorite?
"I am having the Cobblestone Cork installed in my new condo. I love the fact that it is so warm in color tones (and the feet!). Muted tans, soft deep peaches and speckled with browns. Truly a work of art in itself! Decorating possibilities are endless as Cobblestone Cork works whether you live in a contemporary city condo, farm in the country or anywhere in between.

Installation is a breeze as our cork flooring "clicks together" - with the added bonus - the cork pad is attached!"

Blogging and Natural Search - flooring websites

Blogging and Natural Search
I feel blogs are interesting... a neat way to learn about what is important to specific companies, or groups of people that contribute to their particular blog.

That being said, I have been recently enlightened and dismayed by the current trend to post totally non-sensical and fake articles in company blogs purely to get better search optimization on search engines.

Although I agree that getting the most out of your company blog... education for your employees and potential customers should be priority, extra clicks should just be frosting on the cake- not the entree. Reading some of the fake articles out there by others in the flooring business makes me sad (and angry when the "advice" is clearly wrong and just worded for more clicks) as I think it is our job to inform potential customers through our company blogs, not just get some free advertising.

Ok, I am jumping off my soapbox now.

Information re: Natural or Organic Search - Wikipedia
The Google, Yahoo!, and Bing search engines combine advertising and search results on their search results pages. In each case, the adverts are designed to look like the search results, except for minor visual distinctions such as their background color and/or placement on the page. Further, the appearance of the adverts on all major search engines is so similar to the genuine search results that a large majority of search engine users cannot effectively distinguish between them.
Because so few ordinary users (38% according to Pew) realized that many of the highest placed 'results' on search engine results pages were actually adverts, it became important within the search engine optimization industry to distinguish between the two types of content. As the perspective among general users was that all the results were in fact 'results', the qualifier 'organic' was invented to distinguish the real search results from the adverts. Because the distinction is important (and the word 'organic' has many useful metaphorical uses) the term is now in widespread use within the search engine optimization and web marketing industry. It is, as of July 2009, now in common currency outside the specialist web marketing industry, being used frequently by Google (throughout the Google Analytics site for instance).
Google claims that their users click (organic) search results more often than adverts, which has led them to rebut the research cited above.
The same report (and others going back to 1997) by Pew shows that users avoid clicking 'results' that they know to be adverts.