How To Tell If Tile Floor Has Asbestos

If your building was built before 1980 mastic mixed with asbestos may have been used to seal your tiles to the floor.

How to tell if tile floor has asbestos.

If you re renovating a building or redoing the flooring in a room look for the pattern of older tiles that could indicate that asbestos tiles were present. Look for residue of old flooring tiles that may have contained asbestos. You can either engage an asbestos remediation expert or obtain a test kit for. Asbestos in floor tiles.

As you can see this method is not an exact science. Old vinyl products that contain asbestos remain in many buildings across the u s creating a hazard for contractors and do it yourself renovators. Mastic is a type of glue used to adhere tiles and vinyl flooring to the subfloor. Identifying asbestos floor tiles.

In floor tiles asbestos is used primarily for its insulation properties and its ability to resist fire in addition to the tiles themselves a layer of mastic a type of adhesive below the tiles is also likely to contain asbestos. The only way to make it a science is to hire a licensed asbestos inspector or by sending a sample to a lab to be tested but doing so can be costly and time consuming. The definitive way to find out if tiles contain asbestos is to have them tested. Resilient sheet flooring containing asbestos was also produced finding wide use as early as 1968.

Asbestos flooring often has black mastic which is a type of adhesive on the back. The tiles may have asbestos too. Many old flooring tiles that contained asbestos were designed and arranged in a 9 in 23 cm by 9 in 23 cm pattern. Asbestos is actually a silicate based material that used to be commonly used in building construction for surfaces as common as walls or floor tiles.

Armstrong produced the excelon tile series beginning with a plastic asbestos floor tile series in 1954 referring to the product as vinyl plastic asbestos floor tiles beginning in 1955 and vinyl asbestos tiles from 1957 to 1980. Possible signs of asbestos mastic include discoloration and an oily texture. If the tiles or the floor beneath show oily discoloration the tiles very likely contain asbestos. The risk for many people who live or work in buildings with old flooring is that it s hard to know if the building has asbestos floor tiles just by looking.