Just like many of the living creatures on our planet, your hardwood floors will change in response to seasonal changes in heat and light from the sun. If you’re a hardwood floor owner, you should know that extreme changes to your hardwood floors could actually result in serious and permanent damage to the structural integrity of your floors.

Summer challenges even the finest in quality installed hardwood floors. As a homeowner, you should be aware of three main threats to your hardwood floors during the summer months:

Dust and Dirt

In the most basic terms, a drier atmosphere and hotter temperatures in the summer time leads to more dust in the air than the rest of the year. Dust and dirt are extremely abrasive when compacted between a foot or shoe and your hardwood floors. This action can wreak havoc on hardwood by essentially sanding the finish off your floors.

In order to prevent this from happening, you need to be thorough and diligent with your cleaning routine. A simple and easy way to reduce the amount of dust and dirt that gets rubbed into your floors is to stop shoes outside the door with a well-placed shoe mat. From there, you simply need to vacuum up the few stray particles that make their way past your doormat blockade.

Heat and Humidity

After dust and dirt, heat and humidity are the next largest challenges for your floors to overcome in the summer months. Extreme fluctuations of your home’s temperature and humidity levels can cause even the best-laid floors to cup or buckle under the strain. When wood absorbs too much moisture it expands, which cause it to distort.

In order to combat heat, we typically use artificial cooling or air conditioning equipment to regulate our home’s interior temperature. This can help to ease the humidity fluctuations your floors have to handle, but you should be quick to report any cupping or buckling of floorboards to your installation company.

Sunlight

The amount of light that your floors receive in the summer is typically much more than your floors will see during the winter months. The sun’s influence goes beyond just your floors, and can impact all of the furniture in your home.

The first way to go about solving this problem is to stop as much light as possible from getting to your floors by using blinds or shades. The second solution requires treatment of your floors so that they’ll be fit to stand up to the effects of sunlight.

As you might think, living in a house with the curtains closed during the nicest months of the year doesn’t sound all that appealing. In this light, a floor treatment takes the prize. A solid ultraviolet finish on your floor will help to minimize the negative effects of the increased sunlight during the summer months. In general, darker floors require more UV protection than their lighter counterparts.

To learn more about hardwood care and maintenance, visit Smith Bros Flooring online or give us a call today at 1-403-255-7791!!s

 

Sources

http://www.woodandbeyond.com/blog/dangers-to-wood-flooring-in-summer/