Bamboo Flooring Cupping - Prevention and Repairing

Bamboo flooring is an eco-friendly product that exudes organic warmth in your home and complements your décor. It is breathtakingly beautiful and grabs the attention of the visitors at its first glance. Not only does it withstand high foot traffic and daily wear and tear, but it also offers variations in style and colour.

Bamboo belongs to the grass family of plants and is considered as one of the fastest growing plants on the earth. Compared to hardwood trees that may take 80-90 years to reach their maturity, bamboo fully matures in just 5-7 years. Moreover, bamboo has the ability to replenish itself due to its extensive root system. These ecologically friendly attributes discourage the cutting of hardwoods on a large commercial scale and ensure that there will be a constant supply of bamboo in the market throughout the year.

The hardness of bamboo flooring is easily comparable to that of Wandoo flooring. Bamboo is 70% harder than Jarrah and nearly twice as hard as Marri. Furthermore, bamboo flooring can easily tolerate traumas in the form of heavy furniture and fallen objects.

Cupping is a common problem with timber and bamboo flooring products. Cupping refers to the bowing of the material, resulting in a curved shape. Cupping is most commonly caused by moisture. The different sources of moisture include uncured concrete sub-floors, wet mopping, poor drainage, building leaks, leaking appliances, and moist concrete patches or levelers. Some other factors such as extremely dry conditions can also lead to cupping.

If you reside in a humid area, then you can try certain tools and processes to prevent cupping in your floor. Make sure that you carefully read the manufacturer’s installation information and follow the instructions. Before installing a bamboo floor, you should administer a complete site inspection and use moisture meters or moisture testing kits such as calcium chloride to determine the moisture content in your sub-floor. Dry the moist materials such as concrete, concrete patch, and concrete leveler. Don’t install the floor during the construction of your house; rather install the floor last on the project. Never saturate your floor with water and avoid wet mopping as well.

If you live in a warm climate, make sure that you regularly monitor the relative humidity of your location. If it is below 20%, then humidification should be done to prevent cupping in your floor due to dry conditions.

As far as repairing a cupped floor is concerned, you should avoid repairing an affected floor until all the sources of moisture have been eliminated. Use a moisture metre to determine the readings on your sub-floor and remove the affected boards. Once the source of moisture has been removed, it is more likely that your floor will return to its original state within a few months. However, if it doesn’t happen, then the wood is permanently damaged and you need to repair your floor. All you need to do is to check the boards for dryness and sand off the cupped edges on the permanently deformed planks. If the moisture reading between the top and the bottom of the boards shows a high gradient of moisture, it means that boards haven’t finished drying and you should dry them before repairing.

At Simply Bamboo we take this problem very seriously, in the past 8 Years of our business we have used the Sika 2 Part moisture barrier on all our installations. The moisture barrier stops moisture coming up through the concrete pad and into the bottom of the bamboo floor which causes cupping and also mould will build up as well. Also the barrier acts as a primer, which enables the Sika T55 glue to stick a lot better. Our company as never had a cupping problem in 8 years of trading. If you are investing thousands of dollars on a floor, for the minimumal cost of adding a moisture barrier before the floor as been installed is a very good assurance of protecting your investment.

Be wary of other companies that say that you don`t need to use the moisture barrier because you are more likely to have a flood and that the moisture barrier will stop the water from draining away. This is simply not true, first what this will do is discolour the boards and slightly raise the joins, resulting in the floor looking cupped. Even with our Engineered board, this will still happen even with the cross section. With the floods we had over a year ago this was seen when we went out and fixed the floors through insurance claims, both the solid and the engineered (bamwood) both failed.

This is the a concerning issue we have with some of our competitors sales staff who are advising clients to forgo the moisture barrier in order to reduce the cost to make more sales in order to get more commssion from the company they work for. We are a family owned business at Simply Bamboo and the only thing we like to pass onto our customers is honest advice through our experiences and customers get the correct information about our products.