We are building a new steel barn–36’9" x 90’ with a 12 feet wide aisle. I want to put a non-slip aisle in. I currently have a brushed concrete isle and it has gotten slick over time. The new barn will also have a brushed concrete base. We will be putting sand based stalls covered with stall skins but are looking at rolled rubber for the aisle. I cannot find any wider that 6 feet and am worried about the seam between the two rolls that we would have to install. Anybody have any experience with this? The product we are looking at is by The Rubber Man and can be cut to the length of our barn. We think because they will be so heavy they should not move but am still concerned.
I don’t know how it might wear over concrete, but my aisle is matted with roofing material called Ice Dam.
Places like Home Depot sell it in rolls.
Barn builder gave it to me 18yrs ago as he was redoing his roof at the same time.
I have compacted stonedust aisle (& stall floors).
Still doing the job, though in very damp weather it can get slippery… For me, no horse has ever slipped on it, it’s lightweight, so would move under a sliding hoof.
The remnants he gave me are probably 10’ wide as they almost cover my 12’ aisle aide to side.
They provide a dry place, easily swept clean for vet or farrier & for me to tack up.
The biggest problem I have is cross breeze flipping up the ends. I’ve weighted the corners with bricks & this helped. But even when a stiff wind folds the stuff in half, I can easily put it back in place.
Regular stall mat type rubber is incredibly heavy, so I imagine a roll of it 12’ wide and 90’ long would weigh like more than every National Geographic every printed… far too heavy to handle. Lighter material might work on a single piece but not mats.
Linear Rubber aka rubbermats.com will custom-size mats for a barn aisle. I did all the aisles at my farm I recently sold and although the mats were pricey and freight was a fright- even over a decade ago!- they never wore at all, were not slick and saved unimaginable amounts of time for the staff to quickly blow them off instead of raking and watering the aisle. I think blowing them created much less dust than raking dirt day after day, year after year, but YMMV. The barn aisles always looked tidy and the only dust was from shavings, not from shavings + dirt which would have been the option.
If a wet horse dripped on them you might get a bit of slick but they have little grid nubs on them, like aluminum diamond plate, that gives them a little bit of traction. And we never went out of our way to have wet horses running on them!
Our biggest barn had a 16’ x 120’ aisle- massive- and the mats that Linear Rubber made were 16’ x 12’ with what I call a jigsaw puzzle edge to hook them to each other. So there were 10 mats, each 12’ long and the full 16’ width of the aisle and they worked great. So each mat spans across the aisle from a stall to a stall (plus the barn has some side aisles and so forth.)
I sent Linear Rubber measurements and some photos and they figured out the most economical and ‘smartest’ way to configure the mats, including the adjoining side aisle. The mats were delivered by truck and were numbered, and the manufacturer sent us a grid to show how to place them. They are hard to deal with because they are so heavy- we dragged them some with the tractor where we could- but once they were in… they have been great.
We installed them over highly compacted decomposed granite (probably like stone dust depending on where you live and what the materials are called) that we got damp then compacted with a vibrating plate, and went over it all several times and had it very, very level. They are still nicely in place with maybe an inch of movement about 14 years later, and virtually no signs of wear.
I can’t even imagine how much they would cost today but- at the time- they were a great investment. There may be better products now but I consider Linear Rubber’s custom aisle mats to be bullet proof.
Tip- if you do decide to order mats, save your money and order all the mats you possibly can at once because it makes a better load for LTL freight pricing. LTL is less-than-load and the more you put on a single truck, since you won’t be filling it, the better pricing seems to be.
Good luck with whatever you choose-your barn sounds great!
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I have thin, 6 foot wide rubber mat that came in a roll for my barn aisle— so two pieces side by side over concrete, 40 feet long. They stay in place quite well and the seam hasn’t given us any problems . Hope that helps!
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I have a grooming/tacking up area comprised of two sections of rolled rubber over the concrete aisle in my barn and the seam hasn’t been a problem at all. This spot sees heavy traffic, but my horses are unshod.
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