They’ll all hold water, but the bigger it is…the more it holds before it overflows!
All of our mats are made to order, so we get requests for custom-sized mats all the time – and that’s exactly what we love to do! But the most common problem we see is that people often want to undersize their matting compared to what their building needs based on foot traffic.
Imagine you’ve got a leaky roof, and it’s pouring rain outside. You’ve got to keep the drips from your leaky roof contained, so you put something under the leak to catch the drops as they fall.
Which of these two things will catch more water and solve your leak problem until it stops raining?
Entrance mats are just like teacups or trash cans – they can only hold so much water before they overflow! And the bigger the container, the longer you can go between emptying it.
With that in mind…it’s not hard to see why a tiny little 3’0″ x 6’0″ mat isn’t going to work very well at trapping the water coming off people’s feet as they walk into your condo building / retail store / office building! For most public entrances, having a minimum of 6 to 8 linear feet of matting that people walk over before hitting your installed flooring is usually enough to take care of most of the rain and snow on people’s feet. But just like the teacup versus trashcan, the bigger the better – the bigger your mat is, the more traffic it can handle before it fills up.
Ideally, you want an entrance mat with enough carrying capacity to handle the amount of water a typical day of foot traffic will bring into your building on a rainy day. Rainwater will evaporate out of your entrance mat in climate controlled spaces, so as long as your mat can hold enough water for long enough for that evaporation rate to keep up with inbound traffic, your floors will stay dry. If your mat is undersized (or if your HVAC system isn’t dehumidifying the air efficiently enough), your mat will fill up and overflow before evaporation can take the water out of the mat.
A quality entrance mat – like Grizzly FX – is sturdy and stable enough to give you a workaround solution: the wet/dry vacuum! If you’re tight on space and don’t have enough room on your floor to have a mat large enough for evaporative drying, you can reset your mat’s capacity and “empty your bucket” by wet/dry vacuuming up the collected water. High-performance matting like Grizzly FX is made with Econyl nylon and super stiff ramped vinyl edging that can stand up to vacuuming without getting sucked up along with the water.
If you’re ready to put the mop away and let your entrance matting do the work for you, get in touch with us today!