Fumed floors are naturally noticeable because of their elegance and beauty. Fuming process creates a unique, natural looking, beautiful floor with enhanced colors and contrasts of wood slats. A fuming is a natural color-creating process in wooden floors, there may low to high variation from light to dark shades in every color. This variation is caused by three major factors that are tannins, environment, and fuming.
If you want to understand the color variation and uniqueness of fuming, you have to first understand the entire fuming process.
Wood Fuming Process
The following steps are involved in fuming process:
- Fuming process involves placing oak planks in an enclosed environment.
- After this, ammonia is released into the chamber where it reacts with oak planks and causes it to change color. The variation of colors depends upon the time for which word is exposed to ammonia. Since each oak plank is different from another, the reaction of ammonia with planks also varies. How ammonia reacts with wood creates color variations.
- Coming to the tannins, they are chemicals derived from tannic acid found in various species of plants. The color variation occurs when these tannins present inside the wood interact with airborne ammonia inside the chamber. The amount of tannins in planks and how close they are to the wood surface when reacting with ammonia decides how quickly the wood color changes.
Things to Keep in Mind before Selecting the Perfect Flooring for your Home
Before selecting a fumed product, make sure you have enough knowledge about different options available. Remember that each type of plank is unique in its composition and can lead to different colors ranging from light to dark depending on their reaction to the process. Having said this, the unique colors and contrasts resulting from fuming process cannot be achieved from any other wood processing method.
Usually, people who execute fuming process themselves pour ammonia directly over the plank surface. However, this is not how fuming process is rightly carried out. You must know that if you decide to go for fumed wood flooring, it should be installed by an expert to make sure that color combination goes with the room it is fitted in.
Fundamentally, the color intensity depends upon the time duration for which wood interact with ammonia, but with that there is another factor that plays an important role in color variation of oak planks. This factor is temperature of chamber. The higher the temperature of chamber, the faster color change will occur, and with that the tones will also variate. Higher temperatures usually lead to red tones whereas cooler temperatures lead to green tones. Thus you can creatively make a unique contrast for your fumed floors.
Fumed Engineered Oak Flooring
The most common fumed flooring is Fumed Engineered Oak flooring which is basically manufactured in factory where it is processed for several days until the final color appears and is consistent throughout the wood. The longer the planks are left in the chamber, the darker the color appears.
Smoked Oak is treated in a similar way but with different ammonia mix. In some cases, when warm golden shade is required, wood smoke is introduced in the chamber.
Fumed flooring is perfect for commercial high traffic areas like shopping malls, restaurants, clubs, etc.
Whatever your home interior is like, fumed wood flooring is going to complement it. The best thing about fumed flooring is its quality, durability, and wide range of options to install in your home. This classic flooring won’t age quickly and won’t require much maintenance.
Out of all the options available, solid wood or engineered flooring is the best choice to go for. Another recommendation is to ensure that the flooring type you choose is suitable for excess water to avoid any damage to the planks.
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