The Janka Rating for Your Hardwood Floor Determines the Hardness or Softness of Hardwood Flooring Species

Know On-hand The Hardness or Softness of Your Hardwood Floor
With the great variety present in hardwood floors, choosing the best one for your home can be quite a daunting task. It is not so much as choosing which hardwood fits best with your home's overall look as with your preferences. For a certain quality that a homeowner wants, there are about 3 or 4 species that fit the bill. Ultimately, the decision rests on the hardness and durability of the hardwood flooring species you are choosing amongst.

Determining Wood's Hardness
You can go and knock on every wood plank you see and you probably won't see any difference nor determine their general hardness and durability. Thankfully, there is a measure to determine a hardwood floor's hardness to help you choose which hardwood flooring species to use in your home.

The Janka Hardness Scale is the most common reference homeowners and manufacturers use to determine the hardness of a particular wood species. This is done through a test where a steel ball is pressed into a hardwood plank at constant pressure. The depth of the ball after being embedded in the wood is then measured and through this, the hardness or softness of wood is determined. The deeper the steel ball went into a particular hardwood flooring species, the softer it is.

Here are the Janka ratings of common hardwood flooring species:

• American Black Cherry - 950
• Red Oak- 1290
• White Oak- 1360
• Hard Maple- 1450
• Brazilian Cherry- 2345
• Brazilian Teak- 3540
• Brazilian Walnut- 3680
• Ebony- 3692

Apart from domestic hardwood flooring species, some homeowners have opted to go for exotic hardwood flooring species, primarily due to their outstanding Janka rates. These hardwood floors are very hard, indeed.