How to buy a good quality bath

Quality is a huge determining factor when it comes to the purchase of a long-term investment item such as a bathtub. In the purchase of items such as this, it is in your best interest to assess the quality of the products to ensure that they will last as long as you expect them to. Here are three criteria to consider when making a bathtub purchase.

1. Full-bodied construction

Full-bodied construction means that the product is made of the same material throughout. If you were to cut the product in half across any axis, you will find the same material on the inside as on the outside.

An affordable and equally full-bodied material would be proprietary composites. These are stone, mineral and resin mixtures that are moulded into a single solid bathtub like DADOquartz bathtubs. These bathtubs are made of a non-porous material with no fissures, veins or other imperfections.

Some composites do not completely qualify as full-bodied. This is because they are made from material such as crushed fillers mixed with resin, set and then followed up with a gel coat. If you find that the product has differing materials in other areas it could lead to irreparable cracks or compromised structural integrity of the product.

2. Surface coatings

This criterion investigates the true surface of the product and scrutinises the thickness of the product’s rim. What you can do to assess this is to have a look at the bottom and the side of the product to see that there are no colour and material variations.

If you turn a product upside down and find bubbles, veins and crevasses in the material, this should be a red flag. Bubbles show that the fibre matrix is not as stable as it should be, this could lead to cracking and product failure in some cases. It would also be possible that one of these bubbles could show up on the surface of the product at a later stage.

Most bathroomware products made from solid material are typically layered with a gel-coat finish which is equivalent to a paint finish. Although scratches on this surface can be buffed out, the gel-coat finish can become brittle and expose the material underneath, leading to cracks. This material doesn’t stand up as well as proprietary composites like DADOquartz that has no additional coating on the products because of the quartz material used in manufacturing.

3. Product thickness

When it comes to the thickness of the bathtub, an easy way to compare the strength-to-weight ratio of a bathtub is to look at the thickness of the bathtub’s rim and waste. Although styles and product designs may differ to accommodate details such as shape or an overflow system, material with high-strength characteristics will be able to produce very thin bathtubs without any concern. DADOquartz bathtubs are available with a rim width as thin as 10mm, an illustration of the material’s strength.