Types of bamboo floors.
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Unlike conventional wood flooring, bamboo floors can be either vertical or horizontal. Both wear equally well and are about the same price. The biggest difference is in the appearance.
A horizontal bamboo floor will show the knuckles or nodes that appear every foot or so in the bamboo stalk. This gives the flooring a very distinctive look. To make horizontal flooring, 1” strips are laid face up and then glued together. The boards are then milled to size, usually around 3-½” wide.
Because the knuckles are less apparent, vertical bamboo flooring has a more uniform, even grain and a more refined look. It’s comprised of 19 strips of bamboo, placed side by side and then laminated together.
Solid bamboo flooring.
While other solid wood flooring like oak or maple is made from a single piece of wood, solid bamboo flooring is actually made of pieces of bamboo that have been laminated together — either horizontally or vertically, as discussed above.
Usually about 5/8” thick, solid bamboo flooring can either be nailed or glued down. This is a key difference from solid wood flooring, which has to be nailed down.
Woven bamboo flooring.
For high-traffic areas where extra hardness is desirable, woven or strand-woven bamboo floors are a good option. To make woven flooring, timber bamboo — stalks that are 50’ or taller — is shredded into fibers or strands, bonded together with resin, and then molded into blocks.
When the resin has set, the blocks are milled into boards that are usually a little over ½“ thick. It’s important to know the type of adhesive that was used to bond the strands together. If it contained urea formaldehyde, it could emit harmful fumes.
The final product has a hardness of 3000 on the Janka scale, making it more than twice as hard as red oak. And the grain looks more like conventional wood flooring.
Woven bamboo flooring can be nailed down or glued. So you can use it if you have concrete sub floors. But because of the hardness, it’s difficult to nail and may split if you don‘t pre-drill the holes.
Engineered bamboo flooring.
Solid wood floors can’t be installed over concrete sub flooring, so engineered wood floors that can be glued down were developed. Engineered floors are comprised of several layers or plys — a top layer or veneer that’s usually around 1/8” thick, a core, and a base of compressed particle board or plywood.
To add stability, the grains of the core layer are laid in different directions. This works fine when the veneer is wood, which can expand and contract with the core. But because the veneer in engineered bamboo floors is a composite, it may not expand and contract along with the core. Consequently, the top layer of engineered bamboo floors is more likely to crack than the face of engineered hardwood floors.
For this reason, engineered bamboo floors are not recommended. Solid bamboo or woven bamboo are more reliable.
Bamboo floor color choices.
Bamboo is naturally a lovely, light blonde color. But a darker color can be produced using a process called carbonization. Bamboo strips are heated until the sugars in the stalks caramelize, which turns them a warm, amber color.
The carbonization process softens the bamboos, so darker bamboo floors aren’t suitable for high-traffic areas or homes with big dogs.
You can learn more about how bamboo flooring is manufactured here.
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