ᐅ Your Experience with Vinyl Flooring – Click Installation or Glue Down?

Hello everyone,

Could you share some experience with both glued and click-lock vinyl flooring? We are currently undecided between glued and click-lock.

I’ve heard that glued vinyl has the advantage of transmitting heat faster (underfloor heating). Okay, but is that really a benefit? If with click-lock it takes 12 hours longer, that’s not such a big deal, and once the heat arrives, it stays.

Thanks in advance. And please don’t criticize right away, I know everyone has different opinions and preferences, but that’s why I’m asking for your experiences. Maybe there’s something we haven’t even considered yet.

I assume you have underfloor heating; in that case, the U-value is crucial—just try searching for it online.

We installed laminate flooring as a floating floor, and the rooms are warm.

We installed a "dark" vinyl floor on the ground floor using a floating method. The quality of the flooring and the subfloor are crucial; whether it is glued down or click-installed doesn’t really matter. An important point to remember: leave enough space around the edges, especially for large areas, because the floor naturally expands and shifts, so it needs room to "breathe." With underfloor heating, I wouldn’t choose anything else—laminate was simply too hard and too noisy for us. With vinyl, you don’t hear footsteps, and it feels "soft" underfoot.

We are trying out gluing. It doesn’t seem much more complicated. We installed click vinyl here. Compared to laminate, though, I wouldn’t really call it “click.” There was more hammering involved, despite the high price.

Since our open-plan living, dining, and kitchen area is so large, I wanted to see how much we can install without an expansion gap.

We had the entire ground floor and upper floor fully installed as glued flooring. We were told this is better for heat conduction (underfloor heating) and, secondly, that with floating installation, the planks can sometimes lift due to thermal expansion.
As an example: our living room is about 35 m² (375 sq ft) and one side is approximately 9 m (30 ft) long. On this side, there are 3 large windows, and the floor installer said that the floating vinyl could expand by around 5-6 cm (2-2.5 inches) in summer due to sunlight exposure.

Another advantage is that damaged planks can be “simply” removed and replaced.

Baumhaus.Bau schrieb:

As an example: our living room is approximately 35 m² (380 sq ft) in size and about 9 m (30 ft) long on one side. On this side, we have three large windows, and the floor installer said that the floating vinyl flooring would probably expand by about 5-6 cm (2-2.5 inches) in summer due to sun exposure.

Is it solid vinyl or with an HDF backing?