Commercial flooring install field guide: resilient and soft goods

What commercial flooring installation is, and the one thing that decides it

Commercial flooring installation is the work of covering a building's floors with a finished surface that holds up to traffic, cleaning, and rolling loads for years. The products split into two families. Resilient flooring is the hard, wipeable group: luxury vinyl tile and plank, vinyl composition tile, sheet vinyl, rubber, and linoleum. Soft goods are the textile group: carpet tile and broadloom.

Picking the product, prepping the slab, choosing the adhesive, and laying it out correctly is the job. But none of that matters if you get one thing wrong, and it is the thing that lives under everything you can see. The concrete slab moisture decides whether the floor stays bonded or delaminates. Moisture pushing up through the slab is what causes most flooring failures and most callbacks in this trade.

That is why the order of operations runs the opposite of how people think about a floor. The visible material is the last decision and the easiest. The slab underneath is the first decision and the one that fails. Test the moisture, prep the subfloor, then talk about which tile.

Why does the slab moisture test decide whether the floor lasts?

Concrete holds water for a long time, far longer than the surface looks or feels dry. A slab can read dry to the hand and still be carrying enough internal moisture to destroy a floor. When the relative humidity deep in the slab is above the flooring and adhesive limit, vapor drives up through the concrete and collects under the impervious flooring on top of it. The adhesive softens, the bond releases, and the floor lifts, telegraphs, or grows a film of alkaline moisture that breaks the glue down chemically.

This is the failure that defines the trade. It does not show up the day you install. It shows up weeks or months later, after the crew is gone and the building is occupied, which is exactly when it is most expensive to fix. By then the only repair is to pull the floor, mitigate the slab, and reinstall.

So you test the slab moisture before a single tile goes down, and you hold it within the manufacturer's limit. Skip the test and you own the failure. Verify the slab moisture by ASTM F2170 or F1869, confirm it is under the limit the flooring and adhesive maker publish, and put it in writing. Hedge every moisture call to those documents, because the manufacturer holds the warranty and sets the number.

The materials and where each one fits

The product follows the use, the budget, and the cleaning demand. LVT and LVP dominate commercial resilient work now because they look good, install fast, and take traffic without wax. VCT is the budget floor that needs ongoing wax and buffing. Sheet vinyl with heat-welded seams is the impervious, sanitary floor for healthcare and clean spaces. Rubber and linoleum are durable niche choices, and carpet tile is the workhorse soft good for offices.

Match the material to the space before you argue about price. A floor that is cheap to buy and expensive to maintain costs more over its life than the spec line suggests.

Every one of these still rides on the same slab. The material choice changes the adhesive, the layout, and the seam method, but it does not change the moisture rule. An impervious floor like LVT or sheet vinyl traps slab moisture worst, which is why the dominant products are also the ones most sensitive to a wet slab.

LVT and LVP, the dominant commercial floor

Luxury vinyl tile and plank earned the commercial market on durability and looks. A good commercial LVT carries a thick wear layer measured in mils, takes rolling traffic and chair casters, and prints wood or stone convincingly without the maintenance wax that VCT demands. For most office, retail, and hospitality work it is the default now.

The big install decision is glue-down versus floating. Glue-down LVT is bonded flat to the slab with adhesive and is the standard for commercial traffic, because it stays put under rolling loads and large open spans. Floating or click LVT locks plank to plank and rests on the slab without glue, which is faster but moves under heavy rolling loads and needs expansion gaps at the perimeter and at field breaks for large rooms.

LVT is thin and dimensionally honest, which means it telegraphs. Every ridge, divot, and old adhesive line in the slab reads through the finished floor under raking light. That is why the subfloor prep matters more under LVT than under almost anything else. Follow the product's adhesive and slab-moisture limits, because the wear layer and the warranty come from the manufacturer.

VCT, the budget floor that lives on wax

Vinyl composition tile is the cheap, proven floor you still see in schools, hospitals, and retail stockrooms. It is a hard, brittle tile that arrives with no finish and is not a wearable surface on its own. The floor you actually walk on is the wax. VCT only performs when it is sealed and finished with multiple coats of floor finish and then maintained on a stripping and recoating cycle for its life.

That maintenance is the whole story with VCT. The tile is inexpensive up front and expensive to keep, because someone has to strip, scrub, and recoat it on a schedule, or it dulls, scuffs, and stains. When a facility complains that the floor looks tired, the floor is usually fine and the finish program lapsed.

Install runs on a hard-set adhesive troweled and flashed off so the tile beds into a thin film, not a wet pool. VCT is a legacy product losing ground to LVT, but it is still specified where first cost rules and a maintenance crew is already in the building.

Sheet vinyl and the heat-welded seam

Sheet vinyl is the floor you choose when the seams cannot let anything through. In healthcare, labs, and clean spaces, the floor has to be effectively impervious so fluids, bacteria, and cleaning chemistry have nowhere to hide. You get that by laying the sheet in large pieces and then heat-welding the seams into a single continuous surface.

The weld is a real technique. You groove the seam with a router or hand groover, then melt a matching weld rod into the groove with a hot-air welding gun, fusing the two sheets and the rod into one thermally bonded joint. Done right, the bead is then skived flush in two passes so it sits level with the floor. Done wrong, the weld is cold, the rod pops out, and you have created the exact gap the floor was specified to eliminate. Many specs let you weld a few hours after install once the adhesive has grabbed.

Sheet vinyl is also the product that runs up the wall as an integral flash cove base, which is what makes a room cleanable corner to corner. Hold the slab moisture and adhesive to the manufacturer's spec, because welded sheet over a wet slab fails the same as everything else, it just costs more to replace.

Carpet tile, the modular soft good

Carpet tile took over commercial soft flooring because you can lift one tile and replace it instead of recarpeting a room. The modular tiles have a stiff, dimensionally stable backing that lets them sit flat without stretching, and they are usually held with a tackifier rather than a permanent glue. The tackifier is a pressure-sensitive adhesive that dries to a tacky film and grips the tile while still letting you peel it up later for a swap or to get under the floor.

Layout direction is a design and wear decision, not a default. Quarter-turn rotates each tile 90 degrees from its neighbor, which masks soiling and wear and hides slight shade variation between dye lots. Monolithic runs every tile the same direction for a continuous, broadloom look that shows wear and lot shading more readily. Ashlar offsets the rows like brick. The arrows on the tile back tell you the direction, and you follow them or the pattern fights you.

Broadloom is the wall-to-wall alternative, stretched over cushion or direct-glued, and it makes sense in conference rooms and hospitality where an unbroken field reads better and tile swaps are not the priority. For a high-traffic office that takes spills and spot damage, carpet tile wins because the repair is one square, not the room.

The subfloor prep is the whole job

Every floor failure that is not a moisture failure is a prep failure. The slab has to be sound, clean, flat, dry, and profiled to accept the adhesive, and old finishes or incompatible adhesives have to be gone or properly addressed. ASTM F710 is the standard practice for preparing concrete floors to receive resilient flooring, and it covers the cleaning, testing, repairing, and conditioning steps in order.

Sound means no spalling, no delaminated surface, no dusting laitance that the adhesive grabs instead of the slab. Clean means no curing compounds, no sealers, no paint, no drywall mud, and no grease, because the adhesive bonds to whatever is on top, and if that layer lets go, your floor goes with it. Flat means within the spec tolerance so the thin product does not telegraph. Profiled means the surface has enough mechanical tooth for the adhesive to key into.

Getting there usually means grinding or shot-blasting the slab. The mechanical prep, the diamond and shot-blast work, and the slab-quality reading overlap directly with how a polished slab is prepared, so the grinding and profiling detail in the polished-concrete guide applies here too. Prep is the foundation. Cut it short and the best material and the right adhesive cannot save the floor.

How do you test concrete slab moisture before flooring?

You test slab moisture two accepted ways, and the result has to come back under the flooring and adhesive manufacturer's published limit before you install. The in-situ relative humidity probe under ASTM F2170 is the method most specs now favor. You drill into the slab, set sealed probes at 40 percent of the slab depth for a slab drying from one side, let them equilibrate, and read the internal RH. Many products accept up to roughly 75 to 80 percent RH, with some engineered for higher, but the number is the manufacturer's to set.

The calcium chloride test under ASTM F1869 measures the moisture vapor emission rate, the MVER. You dome a weighed dish of anhydrous calcium chloride over bare slab for the test period, reweigh it, and calculate pounds of moisture per 1000 square feet per 24 hours. The common ceiling is 3 pounds unless the flooring or adhesive maker specifies otherwise. The RH probe reads deeper into the slab and tends to predict long-term moisture better, which is why many modern specs lead with F2170.

Run the building at service temperature and humidity before and during the test, because cold or dry test conditions read low and lie to you. This is the single highest-value step in the whole install, so hedge it hard: the test method, the limit, and the pass or fail belong to the flooring and adhesive manufacturer and the project spec, not to a rule of thumb. Get the number in writing before you order adhesive.

When the slab tests too wet: moisture mitigation

If the slab comes back over the limit, you do not install and hope. You mitigate. A moisture mitigation system is a topical barrier, most often an epoxy moisture-control coating troweled or rolled onto the prepared slab, that holds the vapor down to a level the flooring and adhesive can live with. The mitigation maker rates the coating to a specific RH or MVER ceiling, and you confirm the slab is within that rating before applying it.

Mitigation is real money and real schedule. The coating, the prep it needs, and the cure time add cost and days that a job that skipped moisture testing never budgeted for, which is one more reason to test early instead of discovering the problem at install. The mitigation epoxy goes down on a mechanically prepped slab the same way a resinous floor coating does, so the prep, the moisture limits, and the application detail in the epoxy and resinous floor coating guide carry straight over to a mitigation membrane.

Tie the mitigation system to the flooring warranty deliberately. The flooring maker, the adhesive maker, and the mitigation maker each have a limit, and the chain only holds if every product is used inside its own rating and the whole assembly is compatible. Document the mitigation product, the slab reading it was rated for, and the install conditions.

Slab pH and alkalinity

Moisture carries alkalinity, and high pH is its own failure mode. As water moves up through concrete it brings dissolved alkaline salts to the surface, and a high-pH film attacks the adhesive, breaking it down into a soapy residue that releases the floor. You can pass a borderline moisture reading and still lose the floor to alkalinity if you never checked the pH.

Test it the way ASTM F710 describes, by wetting the bare slab with distilled water and reading the surface with a pH meter or a calibrated test strip. The standard commonly puts the acceptable range around 7 to 9, with a higher ceiling allowed only when the specific adhesive tolerates it. Most flooring adhesives publish a maximum pH, and that number governs.

If the pH reads high, the cause is usually the same moisture you are already managing, so mitigation that controls the vapor often controls the alkalinity too. Confirm the corrected pH before you bond anything, and record it next to the moisture result.

Flatness, and why LVT shows every bump

Flatness decides how the finished floor looks under light, and the thinner the product, the less it forgives. Resilient flooring is dimensionally honest, so it does not bridge a low spot or hide a ridge. It conforms to the slab and telegraphs whatever is under it. Under LVT and sheet, a trowel ridge in old adhesive, a high spot at a slab joint, or a wavy float will read through as a shadow line the day the furniture is out and the sun rakes across the floor.

The project spec sets the flatness tolerance, often as an FF floor-flatness number or as a gap under a straightedge over a set distance. You hit it by grinding the highs and filling the lows with a cementitious patch and a self-leveling underlayment, then skim-coating to feather the transitions. Use a patch and underlayment compatible with the flooring and adhesive, and prime per the maker, because a feather edge that powders takes the floor with it.

Check flatness with a long straightedge and a light behind it before you spread glue, not after the floor is down. Telegraphing is permanent. Once the adhesive grabs, the only fix for a bump you missed is a tear-out.

Old adhesive and existing floors

On a renovation the slab usually arrives with the last floor's residue on it, and what you do about it depends on what it is. Old pressure-sensitive and hard-set residues may be sound enough to skim and recover, or they may have to come off entirely, depending on what the new adhesive maker allows. The rule is compatibility: you only bond over a residue the new adhesive is rated to bond over, and you confirm that in the manufacturer's instructions, not by guessing.

Cutback adhesive, the old black asphaltic glue, is the one to stop and think about. It is solvent-sensitive and bleeds through some new adhesives, and in older buildings cutback and the floor tile it held can contain asbestos. Do not grind, sand, or dry-scrape a suspect black mastic or old 9-inch tile until it has been tested, because dry abrasion is exactly what releases the fibers. If asbestos is present, abatement is a separate, regulated scope.

When the residue stays, encapsulating it under a compatible skim or underlayment is often the practical path, and that is also how a suspect mastic gets handled without disturbing it. Confirm the new adhesive bonds to the encapsulant, and document what was left in place under the floor.

What adhesive for commercial flooring?

The adhesive is matched to the product and the slab, and the two big families behave differently. A hard-set adhesive, also called a wet-set, cures to a hard, permanent bond and is the choice for full-spread products like VCT, glue-down sheet, and many glue-down LVT installs that take heavy rolling loads. A pressure-sensitive adhesive dries to a permanently tacky film that grips the flooring but lets you reposition or release it, which is what carpet tile tackifiers and releasable LVT systems use.

Get the pairing right or the floor fails at the glue line. The wrong adhesive for the product, or the right adhesive over a slab outside its moisture and pH window, releases the same as no adhesive at all. Match the trowel notch to the maker's spec, because the notch sets the spread rate and the film thickness, and too little glue starves the bond while too much never flashes off and stays soft under the floor.

Read the data sheet for the specific product and slab condition, not the generic pail. Most makers publish a moisture-resistant adhesive for borderline slabs and a standard one for dry slabs, and the limits differ. The adhesive and the flooring should come from a system the manufacturer warrants together.

Open time and working time, and not flashing off

Adhesive has a clock, and missing it is one of the most common ways a sound product debonds. Open time, sometimes called flash time, is the period after you spread the glue and before you set the flooring, where the adhesive gives off solvent or water and develops its grab. Working time is the window after that during which the adhesive is still live enough to bond the flooring. Set too early and you trap solvent under an impervious floor. Set too late and the film has skinned over and grabs nothing.

The numbers are product specific and they move with conditions. A pressure-sensitive adhesive might call for 20 minutes open and roughly 40 minutes working in permanent wet-set mode, or hours of working time in releasable mode, while a VCT adhesive might give an hour open and a much longer working window. Heat, low humidity, and a porous slab speed everything up. Cold, high humidity, and a tight slab slow it down.

So you read the slab, not just the can. Touch-test the film for the right tack instead of trusting a number from a different jobsite, because the same adhesive flashes at different rates on a sealed power-troweled slab and a porous broom-finish one. The maker's open and working times are the starting point, and the conditions set the real clock.

Acclimation: the material and the building

Flooring and the building both have to reach service conditions before you install, or the floor moves after it is down. Resilient products expand and contract with temperature, and if you lay a cold floor that then warms to room temperature, it grows, and a glue-down floor can ridge or peak at the seams while a floating floor buckles. So the material sits in the space, out of the box or loosely stacked, long enough to reach the room's temperature.

The building matters as much as the material. The HVAC has to be on and holding the service range, commonly somewhere around 65 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit with controlled humidity, before, during, and after install, not switched on the morning the crew shows up. That same conditioning is what makes the moisture test valid, which is why testing and acclimation share the same requirement: the building has to be running like it will run when it is occupied.

Read the product instructions for the exact acclimation time and temperature range, and confirm the slab and the material are both within it. A floor installed into a cold shell that gets heated later is a floor that was built to fail at the first temperature swing.

The layout: balanced lines and no slivers

Layout is where a floor looks intentional or looks like it was started in a corner and run until it ran out. You snap working lines off the center of the room, not off a wall, because walls are never square or straight, and you balance the field so the border pieces on opposite sides come out roughly equal. A balanced layout means no thin slivers dying into a wall, which is the tell of a floor laid without a plan.

Dry-lay first on anything with a pattern or a directional product. You set tiles or unroll sheet without adhesive, check the borders, adjust the start lines, and confirm the pattern lands where you want it before a drop of glue goes down. Keep seams out of the main traffic path and the doorway lines where they get worked hardest, and on carpet tile follow the directional arrows for the quarter-turn, monolithic, or ashlar pattern the design calls for.

Plan the pattern direction with the light and the room. Plank usually runs the long dimension or toward the main window so the joints read clean, and a busy pattern gets centered on the focal sightline. The layout is the part the client sees first and forever, so it earns the time up front.

Seams and welding

Seams are where flooring leaks, lifts, and shows wear, so how you treat them depends on the product. Sheet vinyl seams in a healthcare or clean space get heat-welded into a continuous surface, grooved and filled with a melted weld rod, then skived flush. Where a chemical weld is specified instead, a seam sealer fuses the two sheet edges cold. Either way the goal is one surface with no open joint for moisture or contaminants.

Resilient tile and plank seams are butted tight and square, with no gaps and no overlaps, because a thin product shows every open joint as a dark line. Carpet tile joints are pushed tight without forcing the pile into the seam, so the surface reads continuous and the backing edges meet flat.

Direction matters at the seam too. On sheet and plank you keep the seam running with the sightline and the traffic where you can, not cutting across the busiest path, and you reverse or align sheet panels per the product so the pattern and any directional sheen match across the joint. A seam that is tight, flush, and in the right place disappears. One that is loose or proud becomes the first thing that wears and the first callback.

Transitions, reducers, and thresholds

Every place one floor meets another or meets a different height needs a transition, and these details are where a clean install gets finished or gets sloppy. A reducer ramps down from a thicker floor to a thinner one or to the bare slab. A T-molding bridges two floors of the same height. A threshold or schluter-style edge caps the flooring at a doorway or a material change so the edge is protected and nobody catches a toe on it.

Pick the transition for the height difference and the traffic. Carts, beds, and wheelchairs need a gentle, flush ramp, not a lip, because a proud edge is both a trip hazard and the point where the floor starts to peel as wheels catch it. Set transitions in the right adhesive or track and anchor them so they do not walk loose under rolling traffic.

Plan transitions into the layout instead of treating them as an afterthought at the end. Where two materials meet, the line should land under a door or at a logical break, and the heights should be worked out during prep with patch or underlayment so the finished transition sits flush. A transition added after the fact, over a height nobody planned for, always looks like it was added after the fact.

Flash-cove base for sanitary floors

A flash cove is sheet flooring carried up the wall to form an integral base with no separate cove strip and no open joint at the floor-to-wall corner. It is what makes a room truly cleanable, which is why it is standard in operating rooms, labs, commercial kitchens, and other spaces that get hosed or wet-mopped to a sanitary standard. There is no seam at the floor line for water or contaminants to sit in.

Building it is detail work. You set a cove former or cove stick in the corner to give the sheet a radius instead of a hard 90, run the flooring up the wall to the specified height, cap it with a cove cap or termination, and heat-weld every seam including the inside and outside corners. The corners are the hard part, and a poorly welded cove corner is the leak the whole detail was meant to prevent.

Flash cove is a sheet-vinyl and sheet-rubber detail, not a tile detail, because it depends on a continuous flexible material. Where the spec calls for an integral sanitary base, the cove is part of the floor system and the manufacturer's cove and welding instructions govern the radius, the height, and the weld.

Rolling and set

After the flooring is in the adhesive, you roll it, and skipping the roll is how air and weak spots get sealed into a floor that looked fine going down. Rolling presses the flooring fully into the adhesive, transfers the glue evenly to the backing, and pushes out the air pockets that otherwise become bubbles and loose spots later. Resilient sheet and tile get a weighted floor roller, commonly a 100-pound three-section roller for sheet, run in both directions within the working time.

Timing is part of it. You roll while the adhesive is still in its working window, then re-roll some products after a set period as the bond develops, per the maker. Roll too late and you are pressing into a film that has already set and will not bed the backing. The point is full contact across the whole sheet, especially at seams and edges where lift starts.

Then the floor needs to be left alone to cure. Keep heavy rolling loads, rolling racks, and furniture off a fresh glue-down floor for the cure time the adhesive maker specifies, often a day or more, because traffic before the bond has built moves the floor and breaks the green adhesive. Hold the conditioning through the cure, not just through the install.

Maintenance and the finish

What keeps the floor looking installed is the maintenance program, and it differs sharply by product, which is a cost the spec should weigh up front. VCT lives on its finish: strip, recoat, and burnish on a cycle, or it dulls and stains. LVT is the low-maintenance case, damp-mopped with a neutral cleaner and occasionally refinished depending on the wear layer, with no wax required on most products. Carpet tile needs vacuuming, prompt spot cleaning, and periodic extraction, and its repair advantage is swapping a damaged square.

Use the cleaning chemistry and the finish the flooring maker approves, because the wrong stripper or a harsh cleaner can damage the wear layer or void the warranty. Aggressive high-pH strippers, solvent cleaners, and the wrong pad can all do damage that looks like product failure but is really a maintenance error.

Hand the building a written maintenance plan tied to the products installed. A floor that fails early is often a floor that was maintained wrong, and the warranty claim turns on whether the published care instructions were followed.

What does the flooring warranty actually require?

The flooring warranty requires proof that you tested the slab moisture, used the right adhesive, and prepped the substrate to the manufacturer's specification, and without that documentation the warranty is effectively void. Manufacturers write the moisture limit, the pH limit, the adhesive, and the prep into the warranty precisely because moisture and prep cause most failures, and a denied claim almost always comes down to a missing or out-of-range moisture test.

Read the warranty before the install, not after the failure. It will name the test methods it accepts, ASTM F2170 and F1869, the limits the slab had to meet, the adhesive that had to be used, and the conditions for acclimation and install. Miss any one and the maker can decline the claim, leaving the failure on the installer.

Hedge every one of these calls to the manufacturer and the project spec, because the maker holds the warranty and sets the numbers. The installer's protection is the same as the building owner's: a complete, dated record showing the slab was in range, the right system went down, and the building was conditioned. Document it or you carry the failure yourself.

What to document

A flooring job that is not documented is a warranty claim waiting to be denied. The record is what proves the slab was in range and the right system went down, and it is the first thing the manufacturer asks for when a floor fails. Capture it as you go, with dates and locations, not from memory after the fact.

Record the moisture test method and results, the pH, the slab prep and flatness, the material and lot, the adhesive and trowel, the acclimation and building conditions, and the layout. A field tool like FieldOS keeps the slab readings, the photos, and the product data together against the job so the record exists when the claim does.

Field checklist

Common mistakes

• Skipping the slab moisture test, so the floor delaminates weeks after the crew leaves.
• Poor subfloor prep that telegraphs every ridge and divot through thin LVT and sheet.
• The wrong adhesive for the product or the slab, or the wrong trowel notch starving the bond.
• Not acclimating the material or running the HVAC, so the floor moves after install.
• An unbalanced layout that leaves thin slivers dying into the walls.
• Ignoring high pH or an incompatible old adhesive and bonding over a surface that releases.
• Setting the flooring before the adhesive flashes, or after it has skinned over.
• Cold-welding sheet seams so the rod pops out and the sanitary floor leaks at the joint.

Standards and references

The test methods and the prep practice come from ASTM. ASTM F2170 covers the in-situ relative humidity probe method, the deeper reading most current specs favor, and ASTM F1869 covers the calcium chloride moisture vapor emission rate test. ASTM F710 is the standard practice for preparing concrete floors to receive resilient flooring, and it carries the cleaning, flatness, pH, and conditioning requirements as well as referencing the moisture test methods.

The numbers those standards produce are interpreted against the flooring and adhesive manufacturer's published limits and the project specification, which is where the actual pass or fail lives. ASTM gives you the method and the units. The manufacturer gives you the limit and holds the warranty, and the spec can be stricter than either. Treat the RH ceiling, the MVER ceiling, the pH range, the adhesive, and the acclimation as manufacturer and spec calls, and verify them against the current product instructions before you install.

Two related slab scopes connect to this work. The mechanical grinding and slab-reading detail lives in the polished-concrete floor guide, and the moisture mitigation and resin application detail lives in the epoxy and resinous floor coating guide. Both share the same first principle as flooring: the slab moisture and the prep decide whether what goes on top stays bonded.

Units and terms

Flooring spans a few product families and two moisture-test units, so the same idea reads differently across a spec, a data sheet, and a test report. The terms below are the ones that carry the warranty.

Slab moisture shows up as relative humidity, a percentage from the in-situ probe under ASTM F2170, or as MVER, pounds of moisture per 1000 square feet per 24 hours from the calcium chloride test under ASTM F1869. Adhesive comes in two bonds, hard-set and pressure-sensitive. Wear layer on LVT is given in mils. Flatness is given as an FF number or a gap under a straightedge.

Resilient flooring

Hard, wipeable floor covering: LVT, LVP, VCT, sheet vinyl, rubber, and linoleum

LVT / LVP

Luxury vinyl tile and plank, the dominant commercial resilient product, glue-down or floating

VCT

Vinyl composition tile, a budget hard tile that needs wax and ongoing maintenance

Sheet vinyl

Wide vinyl sheet with heat-welded seams, the impervious floor for healthcare and clean spaces

Carpet tile

Modular carpet squares held with a tackifier, laid quarter-turn, monolithic, or ashlar

Subfloor prep

Making the slab sound, clean, flat, dry, and profiled per ASTM F710 before flooring

Slab RH (ASTM F2170)

Internal relative humidity of the slab at depth, the moisture limit most specs use

MVER (ASTM F1869)

Moisture vapor emission rate, pounds per 1000 sq ft per 24 hr by calcium chloride

Moisture mitigation

A topical barrier, usually an epoxy coating, applied when the slab tests over the limit

Hard-set vs pressure-sensitive

Permanent curing adhesive versus a tacky film that grips and can release

Flash cove

Sheet flooring run up the wall as an integral, weldable sanitary base

Related tools

Calculators and readiness checks for this work

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