Floating Floor Solution

Our traditional platform floor/floating floor treatments (FFT) include products now established as industry standards and adopted by all the major UK house builders.

All systems feature low resonance acoustic chip (LRAC) flame retardant foams which are proven not to compress or deteriorate over the lifetime of a building. Options include timber floor overlays, timber floor direct-to-joist treatments, systems for timber or steel frame structures and for concrete sub-floors.

Our products are also one of the few that hold full BBA certification for the systems.

Floating floor panels are pre-formed boards constructed of varying thicknesses of  chipboard with acoustic foam pre bonded to it. With Panel 17/Deck 9 and Panel 28/Deck 18, the boards are laid directly onto the existing floor boards, the Panel 37/Trideck has an additional layer foam rubber bonded to it and can be laid directly onto the joists.

When it comes to soundproofing your floor, it is important to establish what you are trying to achieve. Are you trying to stop noise from below reaching you, or are you trying to eradicate your impact noise passing down to your neighbours?

In practice, most people are aiming at stopping the sounds from below traveling upwards. Many products on the market boast great soundproofing credentials (particularly rubber mat or underlay solutions) but the figures quoted are almost always referring to a reduction in impact sound and are of very little use in identifying how much airborne sound is being reduced.

The total performance which is normally quoted on most sites refers to impact sound only. However, if you are worried about sound rising from below you should only consider the airborne sound number (which is rarely quoted).

We also give an indication of acoustic performance uplift. Remember that every 10dB of performance uplift corresponds to roughly a 50% improvement in the performance of the floor. So 20dB would indicate a 75% Improvement over and above the original floor.

As a consumer comparing different products from different companies is very hard.

While we talk about improvement in decibels in all our tables many other companies will state a single figure for their products which is often in excess of 40 or even 50db. It is really important to understand that these figures invariably refer to the performance of a whole floor / ceiling structure, and this will include a standardised floor and ceiling that will already be quite well soundproofed. There is no single product in existence, to our knowledge that will provide in excess of 40 dB when added to a standard floor ceiling divide (plasterboard ceiling and wooden floor).

In an attempt to level the playing field, we are taking a standard ceiling; 12mm plasterboard, a void and 18 mm floor boards as our case study. We believe that this has an acoustic performance of about 34 dB Rw (airborne). The final column of our table gives an indication of what we believe our system might achieve in Rw (simple airborne performance) terms.

An important word about regulation E (the sound test required for conversions). We have a dedicated regulation E web site www.uksoundproofing.co.uk. The figures in the above tables do not take into account Ctr corrections so do not attempt to create an off the shelf solution for regulation E.

Please note that the figures that we provide refer to improvement over the average floor as opposed to the performance data of the product in isolation (typically this is impact sound numbers). By this we refer to products that can be lab tested in a way that the product is tested on its own, which can give little indication how it performs in situ,(i.e. on your floor).

This is a very important distinction to understand and is confusing to a lot of people. Almost all of our competitors will state the performance of the product either in isolation or include the existing floor construction within their numbers. This will exaggerate the true benefit of their products. This is particularly the case with laminate underlays.