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Many homeowners choose carpet over hardwood floors for many reasons. Carpets add beauty and style to your home and showcase your personality. It provides warmth and comfort because of its thermal insulation capability since it retains warm air longer. It’s a comfortable spot to sit and play a board game with your family, making the room’s ambiance homey and cozy.
Carpets soften slips and falls, which is ideal if you have young kids in the house. It’ll be a little less worrisome to leave them playing while you do chores in the place. Carpets also reduce noise in the environment, which is great if you use a loud sound system in your home. It helps absorb the sound, making the room less noisy and more comfortable.
Rugs also improve indoor air quality by trapping dust, pollen, and other particles from the room’s breathing zone. Just remember to regularly clean it to prevent too much dirt from accumulating, causing many health issues. But all of these benefits won’t be met if you have poorly installed carpet in your home.
Here are the hidden dangers of poor carpet installation:
1. Could Cause Upper Respiratory Tract Infection (RTI)
Properly installed carpets should have decent carpet padding with the right thickness installed. Not following the appropriate carpet padding thickness may result in inefficient cleaning. The improper padding thickness would cause less vacuum suction, resulting in accumulated dirt and particles on the rug that your family may ingest. Inhaling dust particles and dirt could cause cough, colds, sneezing, runny nose, and sore throat. These symptoms often lead to missed work and school absences for your kids.
Installers who disregard the importance of measuring floor flatness can result in the carpet having gaps where water and moisture can collect under. Moisture is the number one favorite environment of molds. Mold is a type of fungi that causes RTI in people. The reaction could cause allergy-like symptoms such as runny nose and congestion, eye irritation, skin rash, headache, and wheezing.
Floor flatness should be no more than 1/4-inch difference over a 10-foot span. For excellent installations, you may check out Sydney Carpets and others. Another reason molds can grow is when the carpet is laid before the concrete is fully dry. This kind of situation only happens when you hire incompetent and mediocre contractors. Contractors who fail to measure the moisture level in the air also run the risk of infesting the home with molds and mildew.
Installed carpets on homes with unacceptable moisture levels in the air could impair the quality of the glue used in the installation, encouraging mold growth in the area. Moisture level in the air shouldn’t exceed 3-5 pounds per 1000 square feet, and this could be easily measured using a calcium chloride kit.
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2. May Cause Dermatitis
Improperly installed carpets that buckles and folds because it’s not been stretched tightly could collect dirt, dust, pollen, pet hair, old skin, hair, molds, and many other horrible impurities that your eyes can’t see. The trapped dirt will travel in the air and get to your skin. This could cause you to have skin irritation that’s usually itchy, make your skin dry, and may form into a rash that if not treated properly and scratched heavily may ooze, blister, crust, or flake.
This skin condition is called dermatitis. It can be treated with medicated ointments, shampoos, and creams but can make you feel very uncomfortable and self-conscious.
3. May Result in Accidents
Poorly installed carpets will show ripples, bumps, wrinkles, and folds, which could be dangerous when walked on. These buckling and bubbling may cause people to trip and fall, which is risky, especially if you have seniors who tread slowly when walking and young kids who run fast without carefully looking in their surroundings. Tripping on the carpet folds and hitting your head on a corner is a scenario you don’t even want to imagine but is a probability when you have poorly installed carpets.
Contractors should use a piece of proper equipment like a power stretcher to tighten the carpet. Upon installation, you need to check if it’s utterly flat by dropping on the floor and scrutinizing it. You have to check the area with your eyes almost level to the rug to ensure there’s no buckling in the entire carpet space.
Another reason for carpet bubbling is when the installer didn’t properly remove the old carpet glue on the floor. Suppose you’re changing your old carpet and installing a new one. In that case, you need to ensure that the contractor removed the old adhesive thoroughly because not doing so will cause the carpet to have difficulty staying down, resulting in buckling and folding, which is another source of a trip and fall accident.
Conclusion
Making your home a comfortable and safe place for your family is a priority you should never take for granted. Aside from making your home aesthetically pleasing, it should also be secure and risk-free. What can a beautiful place do if you’re always encountering mishaps and sickness in your family? Safety and wellness still override aesthetic and cost. When you come to think of it, accidents and illnesses will cost you more with hospitalization expenses in the long run.
