Let's talk about a mixture for floor screed

Somehow it happened that in any apartment of our multi-storey houses you can not find perfectly flat floors. After all, very often builders do not pay special attention to the leveling of all the hillocks and hollows on the floor, and the new owner does not immediately notice these shortcomings. Embossed floors only after a while start to make your eyes look pale and make you think about how to level them. Because on such a hilly surface it is simply impossible to lay neither a laminate, nor a parquet, or a tile. In this case, leveling compounds for floor screeds will help. Of course, in the case of tiles, you can level the floor with glue, but this is fundamentally wrong and also not cheap.

To prepare the surface for the floor covering, you need to determine which type of mixture will be more convenient to work with. All leveling compounds for floor screed are divided into two groups:

• Self-leveling mixtures that spread and take an ideally horizontal position;
• A mixture that requires a trowel equalization.

Now I propose to elaborate on each type of mixture in order to understand what is needed and make the right choice.

Really self-leveling are mixtures for floor screed with a possible application thickness of up to 20 mm. They are designed for reconstruction. But these compounds are usually used with fiberglass mesh, and they are self-leveling in limited areas, for a large area you will have to use dividing rails.

If the floor needs to be refreshed, it is better to give preference to mixtures with a maximum layer of up to 5 mm, it is these compositions that can be poured over a large area, and they will themselves take the ideal position. But it should be noted that in order to avoid cracks and ruptures, you must strictly observe the proportions when mixing the solution.

If the base of the floor has large depressions and mounds, then it is leveled in two stages. First use rough mixes for floor screed, and after finishing. Rough ones are used to create slopes and in the construction of warm floors. These compounds are only conditionally called self-leveling, in fact they are distributed over the surface by hand using a spatula.

In order to calculate the consumption of the mixture for floor screed of any type, you will need to perform simple calculations. The average consumption of the mixture at a thickness of 1 mm is 2.2 kg per 1 m², after calculating the average floor difference, multiply this by 2.2 and by the number of squares of the floor area to be filled. In order to know the average difference in the floor, it is necessary to measure the heights and cavities of the irregularities with respect to the zero value of the floor, then take the smaller value from the larger value and divide the difference in half. Calculating the flow, you can choose the right mixture for floor screed, the price of it will depend on the type, purpose and, of course, the brand of the manufacturer.

There is still such a thing as a bulk floor, and very often these compounds are confused with mixtures for screed. This is a gross mistake, because the floor has an increased wear resistance and can be used as a finishing finish, but in the case of a screed, the subsequent floor covering is mandatory.