by Rebecca Walker — April 6, 2009—RFID chips are being imbedded in wood flooring to help flooring contractors measure floor temperature, timber moisture and subsoil humidity over extended periods of time.
Jilg Parkett, the inventor of the measurement system, has been laying wooden floorings (or parquet) in homes, commercial buildings, museums and palaces across Austria for decades. He’s also been called as an expert witness when projects go bad.
Jilg decided in 2004 to develop the fidbox (floor identification box), a tool. The data it measures can be used, in the event of a claim, to help determine which party is at fault.
The fidbox contains sensors that periodically measure the temperature and humidity in the floor above and the subfloor below, then transmits that information to standard readers via RFID.
Measurements are performed at user-defined intervalsusually every eight hoursfor as long as 10 years. This data can then be used to show the environmental conditions around the floor and, if necessary, to establish quality assurance or to settle warranty claims.
Jilg has been selling the trademarked fidbox since the beginning of 2008. Jilg and other users of the fidbox install the device under flooring by carving out a small pocket on the underside of a piece of parquet, then using peel-off adhesive tape to attach the sensor tag. The wooden flooring, along with the embedded fidbox, is then laid on top of finished concrete.
To install the fidbox sensor tag, a worker cuts out a small rectangle in a piece of flooring and places the device into the resulting pocket.
For more information, see the Web site.
