Flooring Suggestion – Durability

Q: My wife is in electric powered scooter/wheelchair all the time and looking for a laminate floor because our house is on a cement slab. I need to make sure I get the right floor to hold to the abuse that the wheelchair will give it . Also I’d like to find out about under floor heating for our floor too!
Thanks,
Rolland
A: Laminate can be effective when it comes to resisting abrasion, but there are a few things you will want to keep in mind with your situation. Most of the powered scooter/wheelchairs are rather heavy, this means a decent amount of weight from the machine is being displaced over a smaller area and this can mean disaster with floating floors like laminate.
To make a laminate floor successful in this scenario you will need to first select a higher grade laminate which is built for a commercial level of traffic. Then you will need to ensure it does not have an attached underlayment and select a very dense underlayment to prevent the floor from having too much spring as the scooter moves over it. If the floor itself is moving too much it will damage the joints because of the weight of the scooter.
If you want a wood looking floor your best bet might be to look into a glue down product or a wood patterned vinyl floor. The best overall bet here would be to install something like stone or tile or a vinyl/linoleum floor. These are a bit better suited for the stress a powered scooter would cause.
As far as heating the floor is concerned, you would not be able to do this with a glue down wood floor, but you can with stone/tile or floating floors. There are several great electric products out there that you simply install over the underlayment or inside layers of thinset mortar before installing the floor itself. These electric radiant systems then have a control panel installed in the wall (usually takes up an area the size of a light switch fixture) and you have a nice warm floor.
If you want to use laminate here is what I would suggest. Find a laminate which is commercial rated (AC4 or AC5), then use a cork underlayment, 6mm being your best bet. For a radiant heat system I would look into using the Carbon Heater line from Warmup. This line is specifically designed for laminate and engineered wood floors and takes up very little room while evenly distributing heat to the floor.