About Best Sellers in Hard Floor Chair MatsHere you can discover the best Hard Floor Chair Mats in Amazon Best Sellers, and find the top 100 most popular Amazon Hard Floor Chair Mats. My wife's office has solid hickory hardwood floors, and I'd like to protect the floor from her rolling office chair. What can be done to protect the floor? Should I even be concerned about the chair damaging the floor? In two old homes now I've shredded the wood floor under my chair, monster splinters eventually emerging. I work at home in semi-rural New Hampshire. I think they're very old pine floors, so softwood. I plan to try Shepherd Brand Urethane Casters after putty and repainting. From the manufacturer's site, "Nylon tread for carpeting, and urethane tread for hard floors." Much buzz on Amazon about these. Edit: After months with the new casters there are no new paint flakes or splinters. I haven't repainted the floor yet, but it appears these casters will do the trick.
Replacing your chair's casters can help. Most chairs come with hard nylon casters, but softer rubber/polyurethane/neoprene casters are less likely to scratch or damage your floor. I live in a house full of wood floors (engineered hardwood). If the floors are kept clean and the wheels of the chair also are kept clean, every little damage will ever happen to your floors. If your floors are perfectly smooth and any imperfection will bother you, I do recommend either a low pile or woven rug under the desk and chair. I say this, because if some sand or small rock gets between the chair caster and the floor it will mark it. You can always fill the small imperfection but a rug is a small insurance plan for that area of floor. I was initially worried about this, but I've had my office chair on hardwood for about 2 years without issue, with generally at least an hour to 4 hours use every day (and more when I occasionally work from home). It's a pretty typical chair with fairly hard plastic castors.
I would either get some sort of "mat" or area rug. There are some plastic mats that are sold without the plastic spikes. There are also 'floating vinyls" or fiber floors that come in rolls (often at Home Depot) and they can just go on top of floor without adhesive. You can cut them to size. Usually, their weight holds them down. I would not use a plastic mat, as I did because a tiny piece of something got under it and I must have rolled over it a dozen times and it left a bunch of annoying marks in my beautiful hardwood floor. I would use some sort of sacrificial mat, either a pre-made mat or a section of some laminate flooring material to cover the area that you will be using the chair. Of course I have bamboo floors so it blends in. The trouble is, no matter what you put down there, if it's a sunny room, your floor will age unevenly. I had one of those clear plastic mats down and when I removed it after a couple of years, a huge light spot was left behind. I have recently refinished the floor in this room and I'm reluctant to put anything down on the new floor--though maybe with the modern tools & chemicals it's fade-proof I don't know.
But I think I have to expect some change of color over time. It's a very sunny room. Kept hoping I'd find something like casters with felt coated wheels. I had no luck. Maybe I should invent such a thing, Lol. Bet they'd sell well. My office chair is also terribly loud rolling across the floor. If you're really really into a solution here, you want a Flexible Glass Chair Mat. It's that: glass you lay on the floor to protect it. Just Google that term. The first results lead to solutions. The chair mat is the way to go. You have to use roofing tacks hammered into the corners to hold it down, otherwise it will slide around and be annoying. Getting a mat is a good idea. If you don't do this what will happen is that dirt and sand particles adhere to the wheels of the chair and grind ruts in the wood creating bare spots. Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted low-quality or spam answers that had to be removed, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count).
Would you like to answer one of these unanswered questions instead?Updated: October 14, 2016 Why do we need chair mats? They protect the floors under your work chair and they also allow you to freely move about in your chair. I had to recently buy a few of these chairmats for my home office. My work desk is currently located in a room with hardwood floors so I wanted to protect the wood flooring from getting scratched up and possible dented from my office chair. Also, I have another computer in a room in which there is carpet so I had to find a chair mat for carpets too. I found that they range in price from $40 to $100 and are readily sold in stores like Walmart, Target, Office Depot, and Staples. If you needed to buy more in bulk for an office or small business, other stores like Costco or Amazon might be better. Choosing the best chair mats - When looking to buy chairmats, consider things like surface, size of workspace, and shape. Do you need an hard wood floor chair mat or a carpet chair mat?
Perhaps you have a tile floor or even vinyl. The hardwood floor chairmats rest evenly on the floor and permit easy rolling around if you have a chair with wheels. Perhaps you have a plush carpet or standard pile in which case you could use a chair mat with cleats so that the mat stays put even when you are moving around in the chair. Chair mats for thick carpet will be slightly different than those designed for low pile or even medium pile carpets. The office chair mat I bought for the carpeted room does leave some indentions in the carpet (I notice them when I pick it up to vacuum underneath) but after a while they do go away. Most wood floor chair mats will also do just fine on floors with tile, vinyl, or linoleum. Shape - When it comes to shapes of chair floor mats, there are basically 3 types - lip, L-workstation, and rectangular or utility. The average desk setup can use the lip chair mats or even the rectangular option. Corner computer desks and L-workstations work best when you have the L-shaped workstation chair mat.
Size - This is entirely dependent on how much space you need when mulling about your work area or desk. Some people "roll" all over while others stay in a smaller area. I like to roll around, often going back and forth from my computer to a bookshelf behind my desk. Chair mats come in a variety of sizes, so pick one that has the most space possible without intruding on the rest of the room or area surrouding the desk. There's nothing better than reading up on a particular product and then reading what other consumers have to say about it. Find out what works and those products that fail the end user test. since they carry all the leading brands, offer excellent pricing, and post dozens of customer reviews for you to see. You can browse the best selling chair mats here. Chair Mat for Hardwood Floors: The one name that consistently showed up in reviews was Lorell. Their mats for hardwood floors were top rated by both experts and consumers. The LLR69167 - Chairmat, Hard Floor, Wide 45x53, Lip 25x12, Clear - is the one I went with and I couldn't be happier with the results.