Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Recommendation

The CDC recommends cleaning surfaces, like upholstery, with soap and water (or surface-appropriate cleaners) and then laundering or disinfecting surfaces with an EPA-registered household disinfectant. Since laundering upholstery is not feasible in a commercial setting, disinfecting is recommended after cleaning.

Helpful definitions:
Cleaning: Is the act of physically removing impurities from the surface of a material.
Disinfecting: Is the act of using a chemical to kill germs on the surface of a material.
Sanitizing: Is the act of freeing a material from impurities or germs by physically removing them or using chemicals to kill them. Both cleaning and disinfecting are steps in the sanitization process. Sanitizing is your goal for proper infection control.

LDI’s Sanitization Recommendation

It is a 4-step process. Select, clean, disinfect, rinse.

• Reduce exposure to bacteria and germs by selecting the proper material type. LDI’s research shows that both woven textiles and deeply grained PU faux leathers trapped over 200% more microorganisms on average before sanitization than the smoother surfaces of both EnviroLeather™ Prints and EnviroLeather™ California solids
• Regularly clean the surface with soap and water or an appropriate cleaner. This will physically remove stains, dirt, and other impurities, such as bacteria and germs.
• Regularly apply an EPA-registered surface disinfectant that has been tested and approved for your upholstery and wall coverings. This will chemically kill bacteria and germs that are still attached to the surface after cleaning.
• After the proper dwell time with the surface disinfectant has been achieved, rinse the surface with water. The active ingredient in the disinfectant leaves a residue, whether you see it or not. That residue attracts and traps impurities, increasing the bacteria load on the surface between cleanings. It also makes the material visibly dirty, eventually leading to permanent staining.

Can you get away with skipping steps? Yes! Facilities do it all the time under the guise of saving time and money! Here are some of the consequences:

• Infection Control suffers. You are minimizing your sanitization efforts. As residue builds up, the effectiveness of the disinfecting chemicals is reduced.
• The material begins to look dirty, and stains start to set permanently.
• It ultimately costs you more money. Inferior upholstery begins to fail prematurely by peeling, cracking, or delaminating. Most suppliers will not honor warranty claims resulting from this type of care and maintenance protocol. Even if they do, the cost of labor is not included. Labor is expensive.

Consider how your skin would feel if you skipped the cleaning or rinsing step and only used gel sanitizers to “wash yourself” day after day without showering. Why should we expect surface materials, such as upholstery and wall coverings, to be any different? The result is that you have saved a few minutes, but you haven’t made the environment as safe as you could have; your furniture is going to look tired, and in many cases, it will need to be replaced years before it otherwise would have you followed the CDC and your supplier’s advice.

Still going to skip steps?

Then it is best to select LDI.

We are so confident in the quality of our upholstery that we may also contribute to the cost of replacement labor.

Our surface materials withstand repeated cleaning. If LDI supplies it, you can rest assured that it is designed to perform regardless of the Infection Control protocol you are implementing. We regularly see customers getting 5-7+ years of useful life out of our upholstery in applications where stringent chemicals are used to clean surfaces.

You can achieve the look of a woven textile while retaining cleanability and durability with EnviroLeather™ Prints.

LDI is the only supplier to explicitly state that using approved cleaners and disinfectants will not void our 3 year-24/7 warranty.

Seating Manufacturers and Upholstery Shops find upholstery from LDI Interiors easy to work with and, for the last 20 years, have seen their skilled craftsmanship in creating finished products result in a well-tailored appearance long after installation.

While we are not upholsterers, we work with some of the best in the world, and we try to listen and share best practices.

With hundreds of designs utilizing similar formulation and construction and many years of wide industry use, a designer can have confidence that their seating manufacturer or upholstery shop achieves consistent results every time.

Minimize Sagging

Here are a few tips to help minimize sagging or puddling issues:

1. Be careful when selecting the pattern size when cutting materials. Our wipeable, coated fabric upholsteries have more inherent stretch than woven textiles, so patterns should often be adjusted to a smaller size to compensate.
2. It’s all about creating tension and maintaining it over time. You must pull in all directions, applying some stress against the inherent stretch so that it can act like an elastic.
3. Use high-quality, high-density/resilient (see foam selection section below) foam and ensure stress points, such as tight corners, are well padded.
4. Consider cutting the foam at least one inch oversize in both directions.
5. Thick foam applications should have breathing holes to allow for maximum foam recovery
6. Consider using bonded Dacron between the material and the foam to give the material some loft and help the backing fabric slide freely over the foam. This will help with recovery when someone sits on it.

A misconception that we would like to clarify (we listen and learn!):

1. There is a test method (SAE J855-2009) for stretch and set that many people rely on to say one material is less susceptible to sagging than another.  You cut a piece of material into strips in various directions, hand weight from it, measure the “stretch %,” and then release it to see how close it returns to the original length, which is articulated as the “set %” in that direction. The problem with using this test to try to correlate to minimizing sagging is that with high-stretch materials, you never “max out” the stretch on an upholstered chair.  The substrate fibers on high-stretch materials may never see the amount of pressure that is applied because they stretch further than the cushion allows them to!  We have developed tests to mimic the force material experiences in a chair application more closely, and we test to ensure they recover.  We quantify it in terms of time to give us a comparative test method that more closely mimics the real world.

Avoid Abrasion Issues

Here are a few tips to help minimize abrasion issues:

1. Ensure that stress points, such as sharp corners or edges, are well-padded.
2. Whenever possible, avoid or minimize right-angle seams in high-abrasion areas. For example, use a waterfall design instead of an edge seam along the chair cushion’s bottom.
3. Consider double-stitching key seam areas, but stitching back and forth over the same line could cut the top film.
4. Consider using 7-8 stitches per inch with a light ball-tip needle. The ideal size is 19 American / 120 European. Thread and pressure should be set as loose as possible.
5. Ensure that the foot on the sewing machine does not grab the material as it passes through. If this is a problem, a little Teflon tape on the machine can help.
6. Avoid using a welt cord, especially if it is in an exposed, high-abrasion area such as a cushion top. Wrapping a piece of fabric around a hard plastic tube exposes it to continual rubbing whenever someone sits down and gets up. Also, the welt cord creates greater tension on the material. This reduces the flexibility of faux leather, making it easier to abrade the material’s surface.

Foam Selection Tips

The ILD or IFD – Indentation Load/Force Deflection – rating impacts the feel of the foam and tells you how much weight it takes to compress the foam by one-third. The lower ILD/IFD foam will sit softer. The higher ILD/IFD foam will sit firmer.  ILD/IFD numbers range between 15 and 55. Foams suitable for seat cushions are typically rated 35-55, but the thickness of the foam should also be taken into consideration since you can bottom out more easily on softer/thinner foam. People often confuse foam density (lbs./cubic inch) with firmness, but foams of different firmness can have the same densities. There is a correlation between the quality of the foam and the density. High-resilience foam, or HR foam, is an open-cell, flexible polyurethane foam with a less uniform (more random) cell structure that helps add support, comfort, resilience, or bounce. HR foams are considered the highest grade and have 2.5 lbs./cubic foot or greater densities.

California TB 133

Cal TB 133 is a composite test that evaluates a fully assembled furniture system. There are many variables that affect the result of this test, such as surface area, contour design, and component materials, such as the type of flame blocker and urethane foam used. Upholstery is only a component, so we cannot say if our materials pass TB 133 or not. It is the responsibility of the manufacturer to choose what components to use and to validate the performance of TB 133 on the appropriately assembled furniture system. The same material can pass on one chair and fail on another due to the variations in furniture construction listed above.

Recommendations for success:

If a flame blocker is necessary, try to select one that does not contain halogenated flame retardants. While they perform well, they contain toxic chemicals that have been shown to impact human health. Non-halogenated options exist.

If you require a flame blocker, we suggest gluing it to the back of the upholstery instead of “double covering.” Take care to ensure the bond is strong to avoid the two materials breaking apart after installation, which could lead to wrinkles in the material.

Course Title: 
Understanding the Language of Upholstery Fabrics

Course Description: 
This CEU aims to equip Design and Sales professionals with the knowledge and skills to make informed decisions about upholstery fabrics, enhancing their ability to deliver high-quality, functional, and aesthetically pleasing interiors.

Learning Objectives:
Gain the knowledge to specify upholstery fabrics by learning the key criteria influencing fabric selection.
Understand the different types of upholstery fabrics, materials, and constructions.
Learn how different markets prioritize performance, design, and sustainability. 
Gain a basic understanding of the connection between materials, manufacturing, and sustainability.

Please get in touch with us to schedule a CEU presentation (available in-person or virtually)!
 
Karen Donaghy, Director of Sales & Marketing                
kdonaghy@ldiinteriors.com

Cecilia Staniec, Creative Director                                        
cstaniec@ldisolutions.com