When choosing waterproof materials for home decoration, many owners only have two options: waterproof coating and polypropylene cloth rolls. However, most owners who have used polypropylene cloth did not persist in renovating in 2015 and found that the bathroom floor leaked. Therefore, many people have formed the stereotype that “rolled materials are not as waterproof as paint”.
Everyone in the industry who has done basement and roofing projects knows that the waterproof material that is truly resistant to cracking, moisture-resisting, has the longest lifespan, and is suitable for old houses on the first floor is polyethylene polyester membrane, not the polypropylene cloth that everyone often hears.
Polyester is not an emerging Internet celebrity material. It has been around for more than 20 years and has complete national standard certifications. It is widely used in infrastructure projects. Its performance is completely superior to polypropylene and its durability is better than ordinary paint. However, there has been a strange phenomenon that “engineering is a god and home decoration is extinct.” The reason behind it is worthy of further investigation.
First, let’s dispel the rumors: polyester membrane technology is mature, but it is deliberately ignored by the home decoration market
Many people mistakenly believe that polyester membrane is a new technology.
It has not been verified by the market. On the contrary, this material has long been fully mature: it was mass-produced and finalized in 2002, and was included in the national standard GB18173.1 in 2007. It has been the core waterproofing material for municipalities, basements, and reservoirs for 20 years.
The industry has long formed a clear division of labor: work clothes focus on quality, giving priority to polyester; home decoration focuses on profits, all polypropylene + paint.
Its shortcoming has never been in the material itself, but it is completely inconsistent with the low-price involution and high-profit logic of home decoration.
2. Workers’ low willingness to promote, blocking the road to popularization
The choice of home decoration materials often does not depend on the quality of the material, but on whether the construction master can do it well and whether he can make money. This is the biggest problem that polyester cannot be popularized.
The texture of polypropylene is light and soft, and the tube roots and yin and yang corners can be bent at will. There is no need for fine cutting, and there is no threshold for construction. 80-100 square meters can be paved in one day. It consumes less glue, is highly efficient, and has almost no after-sales service. It is the most profitable waterproof material under the labor and material contracting model.
On the other hand, polyester and polyester filament materials are thick and crisp, with dense velvet, and the construction difficulty is greatly increased: the pipe roots cannot be hard-folded and must be wrapped in radial incisions; the yin and yang corners need to be rounded in advance; the long-haired cloth consumes more glue and the cost of auxiliary materials is higher.
The overall working hours are nearly half longer than that of polypropylene, and only 40-60㎡ can be constructed in one day.
More tiring, slower, more expensive consumables, and greater after-sales responsibilities. In the eyes of workers, polyester is a thankless material. Over time, the industry has even formed a unified rhetoric to smear polyester as “too hard, easy to crack, and difficult to use.” The essence is to protect its own profits.
3. It does not meet the “integrated and worry-free” needs of home decoration and becomes a structural defect
The core needs of ordinary owners for decoration are unified materials, simple processes, fewer nodes, and zero hidden dangers. This is also another major shortcoming of polyester in the home decoration market.
The waterproof coating can be applied throughout the house, and the floor and walls in the wet and dry areas can be made of one material without the need for jointing and mixing. It is the owner’s favorite minimalist solution. The polypropylene is soft and can be directly laid vertically on the 1.8-2 meter wet area wall, achieving integrated wall-to-floor full-roll construction, which is suitable for small bathrooms.
Polyester rolls have greater weight and higher hardness, so the entire high wall is prone to falling, hollowing, and warping.
Conventional construction can only make compromises: use polyester for the floor and waterproof coating for the walls.
A bathroom of several square meters requires the purchase of two materials and two sets of construction techniques, and there is an additional overlap risk of water seepage. Naturally, the owner is more willing to choose the worry-free solution of painting the whole house.
In fact, through the segmented horizontal laying + top slotting and closing process, polyester can be applied to the whole house wall without mixing and matching paints. However, this set of fine technology doubles the labor time and has no additional profits. No master is willing to take the initiative to implement it, directly making polyester miss the mainstream home decoration market.
4. Insufficient channel distribution + low prices, completely turning into unpopular materials
The popularity of home decoration materials depends on the store’s stock rate.
Polypropylene and paint are popular items in all hardware stores and waterproofing stores. They are well stocked and easy to get.
There are many types of polyester, divided into virgin/recycled materials, and retail sales are extremely low. Small stores dare not stock up on them. Owners can hardly see or buy them offline, so naturally no one knows about them.
The price aspect is even more embarrassing. The unit price of national standard polyester contract materials is between cheap polypropylene and branded paint: it is more expensive than polypropylene and has thinner profits, and is more durable than paint, but there is no brand marketing support.
Choose low-priced polypropylene for rental housing, and choose worry-free paint for homes that are just needed. They focus on durable polyester and have completely lost the mass market.
Coupled with the fact that there are a lot of low-quality polyesters with layered fabric films on the market, frequent rollover cases have further damaged the reputation of this high-quality material.
5. Being unpopular does not mean that it is not easy to use. On the contrary, it is more suitable for home decoration.
Many owners have a misunderstanding: the more people use it, the better the material is.
But the waterproofing industry is just the opposite: the popular ones are good in construction and high-profit, while the unpopular ones are really durable.
Polypropylene is popular because of its low price and easy construction. Its lifespan is only 8 years, and the pipe roots are easy to delaminate and leak. The coating is easy to integrate, but its resistance to settlement and puncture is weak. Old buildings on the first floor are prone to cracking and water leakage. However, the national standard polyester can be used stably for 15 years.
-20 years, anti-cracking, anti-moisture, and no water channeling. It is perfectly suitable for self-occupancy scenarios such as humidity in the south, first floor settlement, and long-term moisture return. If the owner can find a professional team that can do polyester construction, it will be the best waterproof choice for long-term self-occupancy.
