Are Your Floors Flat?

Unobstructed traffic in material handling facilities and warehouses is crucial to your bottom line, to protect your equipment, increasing material handling efficiency and improving safety.

Efficient material handling starts with a flat surface and industry standards for a flat floor begin with FF, FL and F-Min. F-numbers are the standards that impact your material handling efficiency. Higher numbers give you high-efficiency, and increased safety. The converse is also true, lower F-numbers translate to low efficiency, low ROI and decreased safety.

Floorcare USA, Inc. provides services to address the F-number requirements of your facility and loading equipment and testing procedures and processes to give you verified results. This can be for existing facilities where the floor flatness has deteriorated over time or brand new facilities where the concrete did meet the intended requirements.

Our concrete leveling can be performed via mechanical means/methods including grinding, milling or resurfacing systems where we replace your cap with trowelable mortar mix or urethane modified cement resurfacer. When we are finished your floor will ride smooth and flat as intended to provide your facility with maximum material handling efficiency.

Featured Services

Concrete Floor Grinding or Resurfacing

Increase floor tolerances in existing facilities

 

Construction & Control Joint Surveys and Repairs

Monitor curling, slab heaving and eliminate panel rocking

 

Floor Survey Evaluations

Inspect existing facilities before you commit to lease or purchase

What are the F-Number Systems and what do they mean?

This number is used to indicate the flatness of a random-traffic floor. FF is measured as the curvature of the floor over a 2-foot interval. Take a grid of 2-foot intervals over the entire floor and put the values through an equation and you get the FF value as an indication of the waviness of the floor. The FF value is primarily a result of how good the finisher was at working the surface to achieve a flat floor. The FF value of a driveway, for example, might be 10 while the FF of a superflat floor could be as high as 125.
The second number indicates the levelness of a random-traffic floor and is measured over a 10-foot interval. Again, take all of the 10-foot readings, add them up, and put them through an algorithm (an equation) and you will get the FL value. FL is primarily a result of how good the contractor was at setting the side forms and striking off the concrete and has almost nothing to do with the skills of the finisher.
It’s important to understand that the F-min value is only applicable to defined-traffic floors, that is, floors with defined aisles along which traffic is to travel. These are typically warehouses that use high-mast lift trucks. There is no direct correlation between FF/FL and F-min. F-min is measured using a profileograph, an instrument that measures the deviation both longitudinally and transversely from perfectly flat.