Flooring underlayment foam

If the tensile strength is consistent through the pad, and the force is applied very evenly then that's possible. However, if its not, its likely a tear could start at an edge and then propogate along. But a matt would never be through this kind of stress, so I think its plenty strong enough.

This place says they deliver free at $39/roll, but it's green instead of red.

http://www.bestlaminate.com/floor-muffler-2mm-underlayment/

It seems all I find online in the Floor Muffler brand is green, even what comes up in a google search at Home Depot. It seems like the same stuff, only a different color? Any ideas?

The ideas about testing puncture resistance are great; my problem is I have no good "control group" for comparison. Adam is correct, that testing actual through-penetration against 3/8 CC foam makes no sense–the sheer thickness of the CC would stop some pine needles and stickers that a thinner pad just wouldn't. I'd need to test against a pad of similar thickness and I do not own a GG ThinLight.

Regards the green FloorMuffler, no idea. When doing my in-store comparisons, I noticed weights varied quite a bit, even between similar-looking product. Sadly you wouldn't know the green's weight until it arrived at your door, unless you can find it in stock somewhere. One thing to note, with the green, is it's described as 40" wide, not 48" like the red. Subtract 1" for the adhesive strip you'll probably want to remove, and with the green you are borderline getting only one pad per length instead of two side-by-side as you can with the red (unless you are OK with 19.5" pads). Since I wanted full coverage plus a little room for error on my 20" NeoAir, I wanted a 22" pad width minimum, and you can easily make two 23+" pads from side-by-side cutting on a red roll.

A friend of mine has a large flooring company here in the Inland Empire. I'll give him a call and see if he uses Floor Muffler. Either way, I'll swing by his place when I get the chance and see what he has, maybe I can slice off a few pad length pieces to try out.

Worth a shot Dowser.

I'm sure there's got to be some other similar foams out there too. When I get back Down Under (can't wait!) I'm going to check out the hardware stores for what we have, and ask around if anyone has scraps. If I can get a few varieties I might then have a go at building a simple puncture testing rig for testing ~6inch squares of it. Once I'm happy with a good one, I'll then sacrifice my thinlight pad to test that too… if they are all rubbish I wont do that as the thinlight is so expensive to get and ship to Aus.

Idea for a pad-puncture-tester:

Square cardboard box.
In it, a balloon, blown up, fitting loosely inside.
Now a layer of pad to test, cut to size, over the balloon.
Now a 1/8" thick square of plywood, with dimensions that allow it to slide into the box.
The plywood is shot though with nails.*** The nails go down, and contact the pad.
Now we put pennies (or bolts, or fishing weights) on the top side of the plywood, until the balloon pops.
Count the pennies (or convert them to ounces/grams, adding the weight of the nailed plywood piece).
Test each pad with at least 3 balloons, and average the weight it takes to pop the balloon.

*** What best approximates the sharpies you find in nature? Nails? Tacks? Staples? Toothpicks? Drywall screws?

Hmm.

Its possible the balloon could pop much before the pads get punctured, plus Balloons can be quite variable…how do you decide on how to put air in the balloon and keep that constant? Hard to repeat.

As for sharpies, I think the first three are probably the easiest.

Another option for a test machine would be to run current through the nail/tack, and then on the other side of the pad have a conductor (piece of steel). When it gets through, just, it will touch and make a circuit. Easy to note on a meter, or heck you could keep it really simple and just make a simple circuit with a globe. Then yeah, do the slow weight adding trick on top. Could just slowly pour in water into a jug on top. Less waste/conjecture.

Yeah, good thinking. You could take balloons from the same package, but how would you get balloons to the same inflation. The variability would tell you right away if it was a good test or bad. High variability, bad test. Repeatable, pretty good. I think tacks are too severe a test, though. Upholstery tacks, in particular, are tiny knife edges made of steel. That's more extreme than nature usually produces. And you'd want to stay realistic. If I saw a thorn the size of a nail, I'd never put my pad on it. So I'm trying to think of a realistic set of sharpies, rather than an extreme one.

Yeah needs to be realistic. I'm thinking Australian sharpies though…some of them are pretty awful, and I've been places in the desert where its hard to find somewhere to sit down without getting a bum full of them! Bindy-I (Sclerolena spp) are god awful native ones.

Nail needs to be long enough to be able to go through the pad, otherwise, what's the point of the test?

> It seems all I find online in the Floor Muffler brand is green, even what comes up in a google search at Home Depot. It seems like the same stuff, only a different color? Any ideas?

I wrote the company and asked…

Q: What is the difference between the red FM underlayment found at Home Depot for $65, and the green FM underlayment found online at bestlaminate.com for $39?

A: The difference is the color and the dimensions. The specifications are the same. Best regards, Giovanna Carchidi, National Sales Coordinator, Diversified Industries 121 high hill road swedesboro, nj 08085

Interesting. Thanks for checking that out! I'm a little frustrated with the whole idea since nobody in my area carries anything even remotely resembling it to look at. Home Depot, Lowes, Menards, very poor selection with mostly only the white tearable foam stuff, or the stuff I used at about 50 pounds a roll. No joke!

Hm. I think this will work with HD but not positive: You order it from their website, pick up in store to skip the shipping charges, and then return to the store for a refund if you don't like what you see.

Delmar do you think this is the stuff Mammut is selling ( for $60 ) as their

"Mammut's Alpine Mat UL weighs only little more than a bar of Swiss chocolate,
making it one of the lightest insulating mats in the world
Application range 3-Season Shape Alpine
Easy packing – fold and secure with an elastic band
Non-slip, reinforced and extremely Super Light foam
Brand Mammut
UPC, EAN, ISBN 7613276205012
Weight 3.5 oz / 100 g
Size 189 x 49 x 0.8
Packed Size 49 x 11 cm
Pad Type Foam Pads
R-Value 1.2
Material Super Light Foam"

I have been looking for something to wrap or have on top of the Klymit Inertia O Zone Sleeping Pad… with a few dots of adhesive Velcro to keep it in place it may work with my quilt and be a light sleep system for 1 to 2+ season camping…

Thanks so much to OP and all who have chimed in, very cool…

With the help of three hyperactive young testers, and hard Joshua Tree gravel, I was able to submit the Floor Muffler to a dynamic test. I put down a layer of FM on a suitably rocky/sharp-gravelly patch of soil and pitched a fly over it, and invited my three elementary-school-age experimenters to test it. They dubbed my pitched fly their "fort," and spent several hours squirming around inside on the pad, crawling in and out, showing precisely zero care or concern for the pad. They were able to take the pad from "new" to "used" during this time. On inspection I see multiple creases and indentations, several modest scuffs, and three pinholes. The pinholes are small enough I don't plan to tape over them. I pulled out several prickly items that had stuck in the pad. No tears. Virtually impossible to photograph but I tried taking a photo of the worst portion:

.

Hope this helps you compare to your current pad.

@ Michael: Doubt the same. Mammut has created fold creases and patterns, and says 8mm thick. The Floor Muffler is about 2mm thick.

Paul,

Finally got around to weighing my underlayment pad.

It's cut to exactly the the shape of my Thermarest Prolite regular mattress amd it weighs exactly 3 oz.

That's light enough to warrant carrying along on a trip where I know the temps are at the lower limits of the Prolite, which would be anything below 25 F.
I'd expect the combination would be OK to about 10 F.

Of course it would be wise to wrap the pad in 3 mil thick trash bag plastic for protection and to keep it dry. Add another 1 oz.

And then keeping the CFC pad directly under my Prolite might mean using a few bits of Gorilla duct tape ot maybe two loops of tent cord guyline for another 1/2 oz.

So 4.5 oz. total. Still OK for the purpose.

Bestlaminate.com will send you floor underlayment samples (about 4×4" each). I just got 3 samples and the one I'm really liking is the Vapor 3 in 1 Underlayment Silver. It seems tougher than the FloorMuffler, less likely to dent or scuff, has a nice sellf-healing property, and has a reflective barrier adhered to it. What I can't tell is the weight, since my scale doesn't have the resolution to weigh such a small sample.

I checked that Vapor 3 in 1 at Bestlaminate.com and its $18 a roll (100 sq. ft.), with free shipping. I couldn't justify a whole roll of the Floor Muffler, but this I I might. I may order a roll to try it out.

I gotta figure out a home improvement project to justify it to my wife though. Let's see, I do need to repair a section of my living room laminate floor that got wet….

Delmar, any idea of the actual R value of the Floor Muffler stuff? I'm thinking of maybe using just a Floor Muffler pad as a minimalist sleeping pad for summer use.

Especially since it seems like it could be folded for a bit of stiffener in the back of a simple rucksack?

I'd be interested in purchasing two full size pads ( 20" x 72" ), if you are interested in selling some of the stuff, or Tom, if you get that roll of Vapor 3 stuff.

No idea; I don't even know how you'd go about computing an R value. (Richard Nisley might–he can probably convert from iClo values.) I wouldn't expect much from .080" foam. For me, its main purpose is as a groundsheet booster for rocky desert soil.

Your best bet is to order it from one of the online sources, where the stuff can be had for cheap. Hillhikerz recently sent me a PM that underlayment was showing up on a large internet auction site for $28 per 100 sq ft, free ship. Search for "3 in 1 UNDERLAYMENT Foam." But that doesn't beat the $18 posted above. Is what you find online the same stuff as FloorMuffler? Dunno!

EDIT: If (big IF) Floor Muffler is as insulative as standard blue foam, a back-of-envelope calculation puts floor muffler's R at .30. Which would be a little less than half the lowest R-value pad I'm aware of, the Exped Airmat Basic.

OK, I finally swung by my friend's flooring company today and found him there (this was my third attempt, he's usually in the field). I told him what I was looking for and he took me into his warehouse where he had a couple dozen or so rolls of Vapor 3 in 1 Silver underlayment (big smile). He said that these rolls were all dedicated for an upcoming job (big frown). He then reached onto the shelf and pulled off a partial roll of a similar looking underlayment but with a red surface (big smile). He said I could wait a few weeks for this job to get done and see if there's any left (big frown), or I can give you this now (big smile). He said its the same stuff but without the reflective surface. It does indeed look and feel to be the of the same material as the Silver, but with a red plastic attached to the foam instead of the silver reflective.

The material was obviously more dense (and therefore heavier) than the Floor Muffler, The remnant he gave me was 47" wide x just shy of 10' long. I cut a piece that was 78" x 20" (being 6'3", I figured it'd be nice to have my feet on some kind of pad as well). I suspected it was going to be heavier than I wanted, and I was right. The weight of that piece was 13.2 oz, definitely not within the UL range.

So I'm glad I didn't buy the roll from Bestlaminate.com. It indeed looks to be a more resiliant material than the Floor Muffler and some other underlayments, but several times heavier.

Interesting report on the Vapor 3in1 Red, thanks!

Yeah, definitely heaver. That must be why it made such a good impression on me when I was examining a 2" square of it. It seems really tough, hardy, and resilient. If it weighed the same as FM, then no comparison, the V3in1 would be far superior.

As you saw above, my oversize FloorMuff pad at 22×78 is 3.7 oz.

(For comparison, the 2.6 oz GG ThinLite is only 19×59).

The GG TL and the FM pads are nearly identical in weight per square inch (.0023 oz/sq in for GG TL, .0022 oz/sq in for FM). The GG TL being 3x thicker, mind you, which I assume translates into superior insulation, and possibly lower initial puncture resistance.

Your Vapor 3in1 Red calcs to .0085 oz/sq in, so it's about 4x heavier per equivalent size than either GG TL or FM. Must be tough stuff. Maybe make some UL sandals of it!

Thanks again Delmar for sending me all that floor muffler! Its finally arrived (I was slowly accumulating other things stateside to combine with it for shipping to Aus), and I'm really impressed with it!

I measure up an identically dimensioned (x and y, not much I can do about z) piece to my GG thinlite pad. The GG is 82grams, the FM 61g !!!! I'm really chuffed at that, especially as I tested them both lying and sitting on our tile floor for a while before I cut it up and weighed it, and I honestly couldn't tell a difference in comfort or warmth for me (the tiles are probably about 16 degrees C right now in winter-they are quite cool to touch). The comfort is a real surprise. I guess the GG foam is very soft and springy, but when the pad is that thin it just compresses down to bugger all straight away…the FM has much more resistance to pressure, the end result being they aren't really any different in comfort. The FM is much easier to roll and fold up than the GG, and feels like it is less tearable. It rolls and folds much smaller in diameter/tighter, which is a big bonus too.

I now have so much of it I can make a few different pads for different purposes. I can see a big double pad, another, slightly longer and wider pad (when I'm less fussed on weight, or its going to be colder), a pad with some performance cutouts/trimmings, and a torso pad to either use by itself or in addition to one of the others. With a good pillow, I find I don't need as much pad to get comfortable these days.

As a bonus, some scraps are going to find themselves in my ceiling to help with sound insulation :-)

Cheers again!