Benefit 1: No Horrible Dust Mites!
Picture the scene: you’re standing on your carpet and suddenly you shrink to the size of a pinhead. What do you think you’ll see?
A dense jungle of synthetic twisted fibre, and sticking out of each tree is a mound of dust, dirt and harmful toxins.
As you start to travel through this synthetic wilderness, you notice that it’s alive with insects, parasites and mildew spores, which are all feasting on the dirt. Sounds like a nightmare scenario, but this is taking place in your home every single second of every day. Those giant insects and parasites are in fact dust mites, and they’re living in your carpets. When you are your normal size, they are about the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence… but there’s millions of them!
Dust mites are close relatives of spiders, scorpions and ticks (arachnids). There are several species of dust mite, but the most common European species are Dermatophagoides Pteronyssinus and the smaller Euroglyphus Maynei.
Studies have shown that the dust mites within our homes are a major trigger for asthma attacks, with over 85 per cent of asthmatics being sensitive to the house dust mite. Therefore, having houses completely furnished with carpet is only going to make the situation for sufferers worse by increasing their exposure to them.
Some say the best way to keep all these intruders from living in your carpets is to regularly use a vacuum cleaner on them, preferably three times per week (a survey reports that on average we vacuum our carpets once every 3 weeks!). However, there are others who say that a vacuum cleaner is useless against these mites and ticks because they are so small and live deep down in the carpet.
Even if you do manage to get rid of the mites, have you got rid of what they leave behind? The faeces of dust mites can remain embedded deep into the carpet, and can easily become airborne. We inevitably inhale these particles, and people who are sensitive to dust mites will suffer an allergic reaction.
Therefore, the only sure-fire way to remove dust mites from your home is to get rid of your carpets altogether, and replace them with a smooth, hard, and easy to clean surface like hardwood flooring. Installing a hardwood floor is an excellent solution as it can be cleaned more easily, and has less potential for trapping dust and its associated mites.
The hard surface of wood floors also helps avoid artificial substances such as pesticides that can accumulate on some floor coverings. A recent study found that pesticides used in gardens and homes accumulate on floors and other surfaces in the home, but that wood floors greatly reduce the accumulation of such toxins.
Also, wooden flooring lasts a lot longer than carpet, will never go out of fashion, and increases the value of your home!
According to the National Wood Flooring Association (NWFA) & Residential Estate agents, homes with wood floors hold their value better, sell faster, and fetch higher prices. By a three-to-one margin, Estate Agents said that a house with wood floors would sell faster than a carpeted house and 58 percent said a house with wood floors would sell at a higher price.
At Oak Floors Online, we specialise in top quality oak flooring and we pride ourselves on over-delivering when it comes to customer service and quality of product. Why not browse through our online directory today to find your perfect hardwood flooring, and rid your home of the dreaded dust mites for good, thus creating a healthier environment for your family whilst increasing its value?
Don’t share your home with these horrible little parasites, replace your carpets with oak flooring and create a healthier environment for you and your family to live in.
Get Rid Of Those Carpets And Make Your Home A Healthier Environment!
Benefit 2: The Wood Flooring Industry Actually Helps The Environment
The ONLY Renewable Choice Is Wood - Naturally.
If you have any concerns about how you may be effecting the environment through buying your new oak flooring, please understand that wood is the only naturally renewable building material and far less energy is consumed in timber production, processing and disposal than for any other construction material.
For example, it takes 5 times more energy to produce 1 tonne of cement, 24 times more for 1 tonne of steel, and 126 times more for 1 tonne of aluminium!
Many people are concerned about forests being destroyed because of the flooring industry but this is not the case. Young trees absorb more carbon dioxide than mature ones, so harvesting mature forests and then planting new ones in their place actually improves environmental conditions.
When considering the purchase of oak flooring, engineered flooring makes even more efficient use of the available resources because only the top layer of the board is made from one genuine species of wood. The other layers (in our case plywood) are made of less expensive and under-utilised wood species.
This construction difference from solid wood (although you cannot tell the difference in appearance after installation) means that a single tree that produces 95m2 of 18mm solid oak would actually produce 430m2 of the same width engineered oak with a 4mm wear layer.
Here at OakFloorsOnline and Talbot Timber we always encourage our customers to consider sustainability and environmental issues. Most of us have children, which makes us consider even more the future that we're leaving behind us, which will ultimately effect the quality of life for everyone. There are obviously many more reasons for promoting good practice but if we can't consider the future of our own children, there's something drastically wrong with the society we live in.
Anyway, let's get down off the soap-box now and stop preaching!
You are absolutely right to consider environmental issues and the way your purchasing habits effect the world but you can take comfort that more trees are planted than used in the production of wood flooring, and in most managed forests these days, 2 trees are planted for every 1 cut down.
The above facts should ease your concerns about buying your new oak floor from us, whilst explaining a little more about what the flooring industry is doing to the climate and the environment.
When all details and ramifications are considered, in actual fact, the wood flooring industry is improving environmental conditions whilst creating employment for millions of people around the world.
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