batten system is about putting some sleeper wood battens/joists, by nailing & glueing them on the subfloor, before installing floor planks over these battens. pros are airy, less susceptible to water/moisture/vapor attack from subfloor, con is, some say, less solid than direct glue down.

Direct glue down- as the name suggests, is to directly apply glue on the subfloor and lay the wood floors into the adhesive. pros. all of 'em - solid, and depending on the type of glue used and application method - sound deadening, sound barrier (lower floor to upper floor), moisture/vapor barrier if applied as membrane - 100% coverage.

I'm not a floor guy but glue guy, working heavily with flooring guys inside and outside of Malaysia.
Most Malaysian wood flooring projects are installed with cheap water based white glue (PVAC) that comes with filler, which are rigid and not moisture resistant - the reason you see those old houses installed with finger parquets, the little strips peeling off one by one after some years. some high end projects would use water less glue but those are minor cases. worse, white glues used in MY are of lower grade than those used in Singapore HDB projects (without filler).

for most individual house projects - chances are - cheap glues are used - as most people only focus no the wood, but not the glue. Some wood species are more water sensitive, expand/contract more than usual, when WB glue is used to bond it, bonding line can snap broken (wood moves too much, glue line isnt elastomeric enough to follow together).

Self-levelling - thse sifus are right - level the subfloor first for installation is always recommended as subfloor condition is critical to the floor condition for years to come.

But in most cases Malaysian installers also omit one important step - applying moisture barrier, especially wood floors installed on ground floor. Did you see them using some kind of protimeter to measure the slab moisture level? it has to be <5.5% to be fit for installation. hell, the really accurate way of measuring is destruction method where you need to drill the slab to a certain deepness and put in a probe for 24 hours.

and what about the moisture content in the wood planks themselves? acclimatized to the environment enough? measure the moisture level before installations? they gotta be like 9% +-2%, too dry cannot, too wet also cannot. if you install when they are too wet (expanded), and later on when dry up more you will see gaps.


tips? use good glue - elastomeric type - MS Polymer based. Westerners have long ditched the use of water based adhesives but went for PU based, or since probably 10-20 yrs ago started to use MS based flooring adhesives. but the price is easily easily >3 times higher per kg wise. You get what you pay.

Wood flooring if installed and maintained correctly, would easily last tens of years - but not a good thing to those industrial players - less recursive business. Had a wood flooring project installed correctly, and maintained correctly, its service life probably outlasts our life. More often that not when an exist wood floor is removed, all you see underneath are those glue residues, moisture built up, so on and so forth? simply because there was no proper moisture barrier and adhesive were used.

oh yeah, Moisture Brrier is expensive, and you can hardly find it in Malaysia. it's not those cementitious waterproofing product you used to waterproof your bathroom, the vapor impermeability property of these Moisture Barrier is way higher, and often in 2k epoxy type.


perhaps also the reason why Malaysians generally only install wood floors on first floor, but tiles on ground floors.

haha sorry long text