What Is Engineered Bamboo Flooring

What Is Engineered Bamboo Flooring – Bamboo flooring has received a lot of attention since its introduction into the world of parquet flooring. Although bamboo is commonly referred to as wood flooring, it is actually a grass that is processed into a wide variety of flooring and home products.

Because it behaves similarly to wood, bamboo flooring has similar advantages and disadvantages to wood flooring. Here we review the history of bamboo flooring in Australia, the pros and cons, and the exciting developments that have occurred in this category of flooring over the past two years.

What Is Engineered Bamboo Flooring

Bamboo flooring first entered the parquet market in its early forms almost 20 years ago through a small importer called Earth Bamboo. In this early incarnation, the product was expensive, soft, had limited selection and was very unstable!

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The choice was limited in these early days to two colors: coffee (carbonated) and natural. These names were to remain with all importers who came later, as Adama Bamboo created names that flooring salespeople became accustomed to.

In addition to coffee and natural, the two colors came in gloss and semi-gloss, expanding the range to four options. But to double it again, there was the option of “vertical” or “horizontal” construction, expanding the bank of choice for bamboo enthusiasts to eight options.

This early product looks beautiful on the floor. It used a glue-and-groove-together installation method (like all floating floors at the time, ) and was sometimes glued directly to the floor.

Suppliers realized too late that bamboo grows and shrinks on average 2.5 times as much as an engineered wood floor in its later incarnation. In the early days it was even more!

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This made the boards unstable and prone to splitting. In addition, compared to Australian hardwoods, it was quite soft, weighing only 7 on the Janke scale. It was still taller than oak, but because of the flat surface of the early bamboo, any sign of transition was shown, and this floor can be quite unforgiving.

However, if the floor was properly acclimated before installation, and the growth (or shrinkage) was properly planned, the floor could be laid successfully. In fact, many of these old bamboo floors still exist today. Then came the invention of strand woven bamboo and the game changed!

Strand weaving was a different custom from the horizontal and vertical methods. Instead of being made from bamboo rods that were actually glued together, strand woven bamboo is cut into strands.

These strands were then dipped in glue and left to dry. They were then placed in a mold, which was heated and pressed, placing the bamboo under tremendous pressure while applying the glue.

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This greatly increased the density and toughness of the bamboo, more than doubling its Junka rating, making it harder than woods like Ironbark!

Two methods of pressing bamboo were to emerge, and there was a fiercely contested battle as to which was better. Both would face problems but were also prolific in their sales, meaning the story you heard depended on what kind of bamboo the supplier was importing.

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The first strand method for bamboo production was called “cold pressing”. In this method, the bamboo strands were loaded into a mold about 150x150mm wide and high. This mold was then slowly heated in an attempt to ‘cook’ the bamboo down to the center of this block.

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Around this time, interlocking systems became available for hard flooring, and this is where bamboo flooring saw its first explosion and became mainstream.

Cold pressing was much denser than the old vertical and horizontal methods, with a Janka rating of around 15. Using bamboo strands forced back together under great pressure increased the density, meaning the product had a greater weight per cubic meter than its predecessors.

The locking system allowed the floor to be laid faster (and therefore cheaper) than previous versions, making it extremely popular with installers. This means that many manufacturers have entered the Asian market, eager to sell to Australian importers.

Soon larger importers discovered the bamboo and imported it in huge volumes. Poor Earth Bamboo – which opened the bamboo trail – was soon run over by giant importers and left in their wake. Cold-pressed woven bamboo dropped in price when these giant companies entered the market, making bamboo look like a better value proposition than engineered wood.

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The sales story was “Why would you want only 4mm wood veneer when you can get 14mm solid panel? I mean, feel the weight of it…”.

That was the pitch was true… up to a point. This skips over many of the very important issues about why we manufacture engineered wood flooring. The story took on a life of its own, and soon the animal was out of the cage. Sales soared, and proud wooden houses, trying to fight the new rebellion, soon joined the rebellion as bamboo flooring knocked their sales down.

Cracks did begin to appear in the armor as demand for bamboo soared. High demand and the sometimes poor practices of the country of manufacture have meant that a lot of improperly cured (cooked) product enters the market.

Due to the fact that cold-pressed bamboo is formed in 150 x 150 mm blocks, these blocks will not always dry evenly. Imagine a steak that is brown on the outside and pink in the middle.

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This happened to bamboo, meaning the boards on the outside of the blocks had a lower moisture content, and the center of the boards from the center of the blocks was higher. This resulted in a very unstable product that tended to split through the center of the plank.

In an attempt to cure this problem, a new method of weaving strands was invented, known as “hot pressing”. Like cold-pressed bamboo, the bamboo strands were loaded into a mold, but this mold was a different shape, about the width and length of a queen-size bed, and just over 30mm thick.

This allows more bamboo to be loaded into the mold to create a product with greater density. Plus, since the mold was much thinner, the “cooking” time was greatly reduced from over half a day to less than an hour! The bamboo goes into a hot mold, hence the term hot pressing.

Where cold pressing slowly heated the pan in an attempt to cook the product down to the center evenly, hot pressing was like flash frying. Instead of a nice tender steak, you got a piece of shoe leather instead.

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However, when you walk on flooring and not eat it, it had many advantages. When this ‘sheet’ was removed from the mould, it was cut evenly in the center and opened to form two sheets about 15mm thick. These sheets were then cut into panels and sided.

The product was denser and more stable than cold-pressed bamboo. It had a greater density, and due to the shape of the mold, more pressure could be applied to it, making it harder. Hot-pressed bamboo exceeded 16 on the Janke scale. In the war between hot and cold pressed bamboo, the hot pressed led.

However, hot-pressed bamboo had its own problem. Due to the fact that it was flash-fried, rather than gently cooked, the color of hot-pressed bamboo changed dramatically, and was often very different from the sample purchased by the end consumer. In the end, the hot pressing method was less
prone to structurally related problems and proved the more stable option.

Both types of bamboo were very successful. The value proposition of a solid floor as opposed to an engineered floor was a story that caught the attention of the consumer. In addition, bamboo was only about 60% of the cost of engineered wood.

Top Advantages & Disadvantages Of Bamboo Flooring

It was not a complete success story. As in all product categories, technology and market competition have created better and less expensive options.

Around 2012, bamboo really started to hit its stride. By 2015, all the major importers of wood flooring decided to stop discrediting the product and jump on the bamboo bandwagon.

As more players entered the market, the price continued to drop, and consumers were spoiled for choice. Bamboo sales have been prolific with every major hard flooring supplier entering the category, along with many second and third tier companies.

As happens when a product becomes successful, everyone jumps into the category, which leads to cheaper products being imported (and they are always cheaper for a reason). By 2016, bamboo had become a market villain, and sales were up.

A Closer Look At Bamboo Flooring: The Pros & Cons

Frontline salespeople, often under pressure to meet sales targets, omitted or were unaware of the fact that bamboo is not wood and will grow on average 2.5 times the engineered wood floor they were sold against.

Acclimatization was

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