The Right Deck Can Make A Profound Difference

It goes without saying that there are a lot of nuances when it comes to choosing the perfect decking material. Fortunately, we’re well-practised when navigating these nuances and providing the right solution for your floor.

More often than not, this is key to ensuring that you can access your new floor’s full potential – After all, the whole point of installing a brand-new mezzanine floor is to provide your business with more usable floor space.

This space needs to be a seamless extension of your pre-existing shop warehouse or factory floor to do its job correctly and make your life easier. The design should support your processes and facilitate day-to-day operations.

You need to know that you can use your floor to store palletised or loose inventory, support foot traffic or provide permanent office space for your team members, which means that it needs to be solid, durable and reliable – with sufficient weight-bearing capacity and a finish that complies with all relevant health and safety legislation.

What Type Of Mezzanine Deck Do I Need?

As mentioned above, identifying suitable decking is important in any mezzanine floor design. But if you’re keen to narrow down your choices before talking to a member of our design team - or want to know more about mezzanine decking - we’ve compiled a brief list of the three main types of mezzanine decking below:

Particle Board Mezzanine Decking

Sometimes called chipboard deck, particle board is made of small timber particles bonded with a strong resin. It has similar properties to wooden decking in that it’s relatively strong and durable, flexible, and capable of holding medium to high point loads.

Particle board can also be treated to give it moisture-resistant or non-slip qualities, it’s easy to cover with flooring or carpet, and it’s relatively inexpensive – making it an ideal choice for many mezzanine floors.

Metal Mezzanine Decking

You generally find formed steel durbar plates, also known as chequer plates, in industrial settings – where their high load-bearing capacity and incredible strength suit this type of environment. This choice of decking is waterproof and easy to clean. Furthermore, its anti-slip properties make it an excellent choice for decking mezzanine staircases, landings and walkways. You can also install durbar plates to protect the edge of a loading area where safety pallet gates are present. Durbar plates can be steel or aluminium. Aluminium is lighter, so more suited to staircases and landings, whilst steel durbar is more robust.  

Open mesh decking has the advantage of a galvanised finish suitable for all weather conditions. This type of decking is also ideal in areas that need high ventilation levels. Galvanised durbar decking is also available for outside areas such as staircases. 

Metal decking is more expensive than their particle board counterparts but may prove advantageous in settings where heavy machinery needs storing on a floor; or where aesthetics aren’t a concern, or you need your decking to be more robust with an excellent lifespan. In other circumstances where you need both durability and good looks (heavy footfall for example), there's an option to use natural silver and black. For one customer, this was exactly the case, so we used anodised chequer plate to work with the imaginative and colourful design details of the venue. 

Concrete Mezzanine Flooring

Concrete flooring offers higher loading than standard particle boards. The other advantage is that it provides reduced deflection and vibration. But concrete floors are also heavy and relatively expensive, and they also need time to cure; therefore, something to consider if saving time is a factor. 

Need Help Picking The Right Mezzanine Deck?

We’re here to help. With over 45 years of industry experience and thousands of successful mezzanine floor projects under our belt, we’re here to help you pick the most suitable decking for your project.

We also have a solid internal design capability, a team of in-house designers and a network of reliable contractors, allowing us to design, manufacture, supply, and install almost any type of mezzanine decking.

For hands-on help, fill out the form below, and a team member will contact you.