Let’s face it. Your hockey flooring sucks. It might work for what it needs to do occasionally, but it could be doing a lot more for you. Just because it does what it can, does that really mean that it’s doing enough for you?

As a tool, it should be able to do everything you need for it to for your at-home hockey training. If it just barely meets your standards, is it really “good enough?” That’s a question for you, but we solemnly believe that you deserve more than that out of your dryland hockey tiles. 

But, what exactly is it about your hockey tiles that suck? If you don’t know much about dryland hockey tiles in general, you might not understand what could possibly be wrong with the ones that you use in your home. That being said, there is definitely room for improvement. 

Let’s take a look at why your tiles suck so you can have a better idea of what you should look for when you go about replacing the tiles in your home, which is really something that you should get on top of as soon as you possibly can. 

You Need a Special Cleaner for Your Tiles

If there’s anything that makes tiles suck right off the bat, it’s the need for a special cleaner that you need to use on the tiles. We wouldn’t bother buying any tiles that need a special cleaner because that’s just a way for the company to make more money from you. 

These special cleaners are needed for sub-par products so you don’t mess up the coating that allows for any sort of sliding around to happen. That kind of coating is entirely unnecessary for high-quality products and it is only used in subpar tiles. 

If you need special chemicals to make sure that your tiles don’t deteriorate, what’s going to happen if you spill water on them? That can make a huge difference in the lifespan of your tiles, which could lead to you needing to replace them pretty quickly anyway. That’s not great. 

On top of that, if your tiles need a special cleaner that means that you’ll need to keep giving the company money for their special chemicals. That means that for the length of time that you own the tiles you’re stuck doing business with the company that you bought them from. 

We don’t like being stuck with a company for too long and you shouldn’t stand for it either. Good tiles don’t need special cleaners, if they need cleaners at all. Most tiles that are worth their salt only require water to get showroom-quality clean, not fancy proprietary chemicals that can only be bought from a single vendor. 

Sticky Tiles are a No Go

If you have hockey tiles, there’s a good chance that you want to, you know, slide around on them. That’s kind of the whole point. No, you can’t use your ice skates on hockey tiles, but that doesn’t mean that they should be sticky. 

You want to be able to slide around in your socks on the tiles like a freshly waxed floor. If your tiles are sticky, that’s not possible. More than likely your socks just get stuck and get the coating off on them.

Your socks aren’t the biggest thing that you’re going to run into with sticky tiles. Your puck is also going to run into some issues here. You want your puck to be able to glide across the flooring and not get stuck in spots. If it gets stuck, that’s providing bad practice. 

Good hockey tiles allow for a lot of gliding when it comes to the puck. You want to be able to hit the puck around with little to no issue. That is, after all, the experience that real ice is going to give you when you hit your puck around. Why would you accept anything less?

Sticky tiles are a surefire way to tell that they aren’t great because that means that whatever coating the company used to give the surface any sort of slickness is coming off and causing you issues. That’s never a good thing and you should look into better tiles as soon as possible.

Not Weatherproof?

What were you thinking when you bought the tiles that weren’t weatherproof? Sure, at a glance that might not seem like that big of a deal, but in a lot of situations, it makes a world of difference. Let’s look at just a few situations where you might have to move the tiles outside and it would matter if they’re weatherproof:

• Need to take back the room for a home office. 
• Having guests over that need somewhere to sleep.
• Want to use the basement for storage because you’re running out of space. 
• Throwing a family get-together and you need the garage to park your cars.
• The birth of a new child requiring the use of the room for a nursery. 
• Any other reason you would need to free up space in your home. 

When that happens, what if the tiles still need to be used? Well, you’d set them up in the backyard. What if the tiles aren’t weatherproof? You’d need to be on top of the weather reports every single day and be prepared to pull the tiles in at a moment’s notice if rain, snow, hail, or extreme heat comes around. 

That simply won’t work. What if you’re at your job and it starts raining? Guess that’s just the end of those hockey tiles, hopefully, they rest in peace. There’s nothing that can be done about that if your tiles aren’t made to withstand the elements. 

High-quality tiles are designed to hold up against the elements. It doesn’t matter if it rains 18 inches right before a snowstorm, good tiles will be ready for anything that you have to throw at it.  That means that you could set them up in your backyard and just leave them without thinking about it. 

That’s the kind of reliability that you want from your hockey tiles. Without that kind of weatherproofing, you can’t expect the tiles to stand up to much. This is an essential feature of any tiles that are worth the money that you spend on them unless you’re ok with replacing them and spending a bunch of money to do so. 

Not Designed for a lot of Weight

If your tiles can’t handle a heavy load they also flat-out suck. That limits the places that you’re able to put it and, as we mentioned in the last section, that’s not great for ensuring that your tiles will be usable anywhere you could need them to be. 

Let’s say, for instance, that you want to keep your tiles in your garage. If the tiles are designed to be able to handle a lot of weight, that means that you can still park in your garage if you need to without having to worry about the tiles being messed up by the weight of your car. 

Having tiles that can withstand weight also means that you don’t have to worry about your car getting messed up by the tiles breaking beneath them. Who knows what kind of damage that could do to your car, and any car damage is more expensive than damage to your tiles by orders of magnitude. 

On top of being able to park your car on it, there are a few other logistical issues with having tiles that aren’t able to withstand a lot of weight. What if you want a group of people to use the tiles at the same time? People have mass and the more people you have the more mass they have. 

Tiles that can’t hold a lot of weight might crack if you have too many people on them and that’s not good for anyone involved. Imagine having a fun time practicing hockey on your hockey tiles with your friends and too many people are on it and it just breaks on you. 

There are only a few things that could bring your hockey training session to a close as quickly as broken tiles, so you want to make sure that your tiles will be able to stand up to whatever amount of weight you need to put on them. 

Low-quality tiles are rarely built to be able to withstand enough weight for you to really get the most out of them. If you want to have friends over to practice with you, you absolutely have to make sure that the tiles are ready for that kind of weight. 

Get Better Tiles

Getting better tiles might sound hard but it’s not. All you need to do is look around and find good deals on great tiles. Without doing this you run the risk of having tiles that won’t have a very long lifespan, and that means needing to replace your tiles every few years. 

That’s fine if you have the money to burn, but most of us don’t. In fact, it’s safe to say that the vast majority of people would prefer to not have to replace their hockey tiles all the time. Getting good tiles can help you avoid having to replace your tiles too often.