How to choose good quality of polycarbonate material for greenhouses
Due to the fact that there are a lot of offers on the market the main questions come up:
- what kind of material to buy;
- how much to pay to get quality for reasonable money.
We will try to help to answer all the questions and understand all the details.
The most important factors that distinguish the good cellular polycarbonate material from not very good quality one are:
- raw materials;
- the grade of protection from sunlight.
The good type of polycarbonate is made from primary raw materials practically without adding secondary ones. The inclusions of recyclable materials in the polycarbonate sheet can be determined visually. For the determination of inclusion of secondary materials it will be enough to look through the sheet of polycarbonate to the light. If you will see small dots sometimes reaching a size of a millimeter or more then probably you are holding not very good quality of polycarbonate material in your hands. Good polycarbonate material has pretty much flat structure, the same thickness and density on the entire surface of the sheet.
The flexibility of polycarbonate is one of the indicators of the quality of the material. The good type of the polycarbonate material is elastic. If you are trying to bend the material slightly and you feel that the cellular polycarbonate can burst easily then you probably are still holding in your hands the material that we do not recommend to purchase. To protect yourself you have to ask the seller to show you the warranty obligations of the polycarbonate material from the factory manufacturer. It is very often when the warranty that specified on the protective sheet of the polycarbonate does not match to the claimed factory warranty. If you graduated from a technical college or at least remember the school physics course we recommend to learn technical characteristics of polycarbonate material before start choosing the material to purchase.
You have to pay particular attention to the following parameters: resistance to shock for various temperatures, resistance to heat transfer, bending strength. There is another important criterion for the evaluation of cellular polycarbonate – its volume weight. If the polycarbonate material has low weight it means the material has good quality. But the cellular polycarbonate is not a feather. If you feel that the sheet is too light and soft then obviously something is wrong. You can make the following notes about the weight of a square meter of good polycarbonate: with the thickness of 6 mm the weight should be 1.3 kg; with the thickness of 8 mm the weight should be 1.5 kg.
So let’s make conclusion. If you appreciate the quality and reliability, then you can choose these types of greenhouses to buy together with the excellent, proven polycarbonate after you got all the basic information from us.
