Chairmat recommendations wanted

We also use chair mats for work areas. both my wife and I have 2 in our respective places. I have found the cheapest to be at Sam's Club. they are cheaper, by far than any of the office supply places. If you belong, or know somebody who does, they are by far the cheapest place for those things. Understand that they will wear out with use, especially if used on a pile carpet. The longest wearing ones are those without the little knobs on the underside that grip the carpet. The flat back ones are for use on wood floors, and will slide around on carpet.

John

Correction: I should have said the little knobbed back ones are for pile carpets, and the flat back ones are for wooden floors.

John

Hi Kate, I got mine from Staples. It is the clear plastic mat and I don't know if you can get another kind that is more of a heavy duty. Mine is on a wooden floor. I have the office type chair on rollers. I think that it cost less than $50. Don't know if this info will help you or not. Barbara in SC

The toughest stuff I've ever seen that you could use for that was used to line a shower cubicle at a backpacker hostel in the Scottish Highlands.

The owner had been a miner in the north of England. He quit after the strike of 1984, and Thatcher shut down the mine he worked in shortly after. He used his redundancy money to buy the hostel, and seemingly got some odds and ends from the mine to help make it cosy. So the shower was lined with overlapping sheets of fibreglass-reinforced black rubber belting, as used for transporting coal from the face. Since the stuff was designed to handle tons of coal an hour for years on end, it would probably outlast the hostel's building stones.

Having a shower was somewhere between being locked in a padded cell and being trapped in a rubber fetishist's fantasy.

Maybe a look in the Yellow Pages for "industrial belting" might locate something comparable.

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The best chair mat is have found to be a 3/4" sheet of plywood. DH beveled the edges, it's wondeful. It's been down for 4 or 5 years and I've had no problems. You should be what I did to the vinyl flooring when I was quilting on my large frame. I actually had waves worn in the vinyl from rolling back and forth! DH happily put down the plywood after that event. Bonnie NJ

Went to Office max?Depot ? and got one for DH...heaviest duty , largest available, one they had. Cost about but not over $100. It's almost 2 years old and got daily use for most of that time. Made by Rubbermaid Office Solutions Fine print reads: for all carpet styles

HTH Butterfly (who doesn't use one )

I tried to find the receipt for the mats, but couldn't. My wife and I both think they were about $20 per mat. I do know they were less than half of what office depot and office max wanted for similar sized mats.

John

I googled "heavy duty chair mats" and there are a number of choices for various kinds of carpets that say they'll last a lifetime with no cracks or splits.

Happy Shopping,

Lenore

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What causes the mats to crack is the size of the little pad on the bottom of the chair. That, and oxidation due to sunlight degradation and the attendant increase of brittleness of the mat. If the pad has a larger pad size of contact point, it will take longer to crack and break through the mat than a smaller contact point pad which concentrates all the weight and force on a smaller area. They all will fail sooner or later, the larger contact point pad will just take longer to do so.