Nearly lost a whole day fighting a backing that kept separating

I was installing a plush carpet in a bedroom off I-35 last Tuesday and the latex backing kept peeling away from the primary backing every time I tried to power stretch. Spent almost 4 hours troubleshooting before I realized the storage room at the distributor had been sitting at 95 degrees for two weeks. Has anyone else dealt with heat damaged backing on a big roll?

2 comments

2 Comments

terryallen9d ago

Man, that brings back a memory. I read somewhere that latex backing starts breaking down at anything above 85 degrees, and once it goes bad there's no fixing it. A buddy of mine had a similar issue with a roll that sat in a hot warehouse over a holiday weekend and the backing felt almost greasy when he tried to stretch it. The heat basically cooks the latex and makes it separate from the fibers like you described. Sometimes you can catch it early by flexing the roll and looking for that powdery dust or sticky spots before you even cut it. Worst part is the distributor won't always take responsibility if you already started installing it and cut the roll.

evan_jenkins8d ago

Respectfully, I see it a bit different. I've had rolls sit in a trailer hitting way hotter than 85 degrees for days and they were fine. A lot depends on the manufacturer and how fresh the latex is when it gets rolled. Some of that cheap stuff from overseas has a shorter shelf life to begin with, so heat just speeds up what was already going to happen. The sticky greasy feel your buddy got, I've seen that too but it was usually from a batch that was old stock to begin with. You can have two rolls from different brands sitting side by side in the same hot warehouse, one goes bad and the other is perfectly fine. Its not just the heat, its the quality of the latex itself and how long it was sitting on a shelf before you ever got it.