Burmatex Alaska Office Carpet Tiles

Heavy Contract Solution Dyed Nylon Carpet Tiles made in Britain

Alaska is a hard-wearing carpet tile providing a highly robust yet extremely elegant design with vibrant colours and design patterns for the modern office.  Alaska was designed by Burmatex and is manufactured inhouse at their production site in Yorkshire, UK.

This is a heavy contract 100% Solution Dyed Aquafil Econyl® Nylon product, with a heavy pile weight of 800 grammes per square metre, meaning that it will stand up extremely well within a busy office environment whilst providing a luxurious appearance.  

This is one of many Burmatex and other carpet tile ranges supplied and fitted by Octopus Interiors into offices throughout London and the Home Counties. Octopus fit these tiles to raised access and screeded flooring using F Ball Styccobond F41 Carpet Tackifier or double sided sticky or magnetic patches where appropriate.

Alaska is available as a regular 50cm by 50cm square tile and can be laid as a single colour throughout or in a mix of colours from the range of 12 colourways.  It also complements other ranges and can be used in combination with these, such as Osaka, Origin and Rainfall. 

The Alaska Colourways

 

 

 

 

Heavy Contract Carpet Tiles – What are they?

What exactly is a Heavy Contract carpet tile?   Wonderful designs and patterns aside,  office floor coverings need to be, above all, hardwearing and easy to maintain.  No matter where in the office carpet tiles are laid – even in less used areas such as boardrooms and executive suites – its going to be difficult to keep a light to medium rated tile looking good for long. Why?  well there are a number of factors to consider:-

• Colour Fastness
• Ease of cleaning and the chances of being able to remove stains – particularly spilt drinks
• Wear from walking
• Wear from desk chairs being constantly rolled back and forth over the carpet surface
• Retention of pile height

When choosing new carpet tiles (and also LVT vinyl) for your office, its useful to be aware of the fact that the manufacturers give them different industry ratings dependent on how well they are expected to perform (how long they’ll last or stay looking good) in different settings. These ratings include light, medium and heavy domestic/residential and light medium and heavy commercial/industrial.  But don’t confuse commercial and domestic ratings as being the same thing because they might not be. A heavy domestic might only have the same rating as a light or medium commercial rating, so you won’t want to put that in your office!  Furthermore, the ratings put on the products are decided by the individual manufacturers  – which they can do as long as theirs comply with a set of minimum industry standards. In short, it means that not all heavy contract commercial tiles, for example, are equal, and some are harder wearing, more colourfast and will retain their appearance for a lot longer than others. So what are these considerations?

Firstly, we need to emphasise that anything less than a Heavy Contract Commercial rating is highly unlikely to perform well in an office.

Colour Fastness:  If you want the best chance of keeping your carpet looking as good as it did on the day it was laid for as long as possible – years rather than months – then the way to go is to make sure it is constructed of Solution Dyed yarn.  The solution dying process involves dying the individual fibres before they are spun into a yarn and the resulting yarn therefore has a consistent colour through to the core rather than just a coating of colour on the outer surface as with most other dying methods. This is important on two accounts. Firstly, it will resist UV light fading for far longer and secondly, it can be cleaned more rigorously and with appropriate mild detergents in order to remove stains. The same treatment on, for instance a batch dyed yarn, may result in the wearing off of the outer colour coat and exposing the lighter colour of the yarn fibres.

Wear:  Heavy foot traffic and chair castors are particularly demanding on an office carpet. These two activities create wear by way of abrasion and compression of the carpet pile, so what sort of material is best at resisting this whilst also looking the part?  Beautiful it might be, an office is just not the place for a wool or wool mix carpet and as such the majority of commercial yarn is either Polypropylene or Nylon (also known as Polyamide).  Polypropylene is a pretty tough material, but its weakness is that it loses its form relatively easily. In other words, with chairs constantly rolling across it or people walking on it, the pile has a tendency to flatten and never spring back to its original height.  This can lead to a fairly tired appearance very quickly.  By contrast, nylon retains its form a lot better and as such a well maintained  quality heavy contract tile made of this is likely to retain most of its original appearance for a number of years. Indeed, many manufacturers will provide a 10 year warranty on such products.

So, most (but not all) heavy contract carpet tiles are constructed of nylon yarn, and many (but by no means all) are solution dyed.  For the most robust combination, you should certainly be considering solution dyed nylon. But, as mentioned earlier, not all heavy contract rated products are equal. The Use Class 33 to which they comply is a minimum standard, and better production techniques, different types of Polyamide yarn, a heavier pile weight (more densely woven yarn) and so on can provide enhanced performance.

See more Burmatex Carpet Tile collections