I have the 1/4 roll mats as my aisle mats in my barn-- I needed to run a mat from the big door to the stalls, nearly 60 feet, so these made sense. They lay on my smooth concrete floor very well. I used two, 50 foot long strips side by side.
That said, my 12x12 stalls have 4x6, 3/4 inch rubber mats cut to fit tightly over a packed gravel base. My horses come and go nightly and they really have held up, and in place, over the last 16 years. Properly packing the deep gravel base is key, as well as fitting the mats tightly and smoothly the first time. I’ve had to refit one stall, as rodents dug out one edge and the mats shifted. Grrr!
I bed using wood pellets, so my boys are on smooth surface with plenty of fluff to lie in or pee in. One never lays down (yes, it’s sad, but his knee and hock are getting unreliable) and the other loves to, so I try to provide 4-6" of bedding, centered.
I have an 8’x15’ wash stall being poured soon… I wonder if the 1/4 mat ‘roll’ might work for that.
Im excited about the stall savers option… frankly, my own personal experience with stall matting is the 3/4" 4x6’ that you mention above. But I also have lots of experience having to bring in more stone dust because of rat tunnels underneath. NOT FUN.
I have interlocking EVA mats on concrete floors. They are much softer than traditional rubber mats and we bed medium deep. You can see them slightly compress under a horse which you can not see with the rubber. There are 6 pieces in a 12x12 floor and they are very easy to move and install (not that I’ve ever moved them). I have them in my washrack too and they are so easy to pull up to clean underneath and put back down and lock in place. They are still as tightly interlocked as the day they were installed, there are no catching pitchforks or curling edges.
If I were to build again I might do a pour in floor, but haven’t’ looked into the cost. My mats were expensive, something like 1200 per stall.
The mattress systems are a hard pass for me, I hate that they are permanently attached to the stall sides and they are lumpy. Like Bluey said, horses do not need to be standing on lumpy surfaces all the time, it’s bad for their legs.
I had rat tunnels under one of my stalls a couple of years ago. I had to unscrew a corner section of the mat, fold it back and rake the gravel smooth then reattach. I did this after I trapped the rats and made sure there weren’t any others.
The 3/4" 4’ x 8’ that Gebo’s here sells, a small company similar to the larger TSC.
Same mats, better price.
I matted 80’ length 20’ wide under the barn overhang with them on our packed dirt with 1/2" of sand on top to help the mats settle and it has worked fine, even with a kamikaze horse, that never walked, just ran every place, hard on any footing.
In the old race horse training barn we had caliche floors and bedded with straw.
That was a terrible mess, horses would paw the caliche up and wad it around with the straw and make for heavy, stinky and dirty bedding.
We were continuously adding caliche to the stalls.
Caliche is not very porous, most wet will stay on top and be slick.
Maybe with mats over it it could hold better?
We didn’t have mats decades ago.
I think each barn manager and each horse managed needs careful attention and thought and then try to do best, no two quite alike.
What may work great for one, someone else may find a better way for them.
That is why all kinds of ideas and suggestions is best, so we have more to choose from.
Mine are only up overnight occasionally, but they are fed nightly in their stalls .I have layer of gravel fines (maybe 4"?) compacted and overlaid with the 4x6x3/4 mats from TSC. I looked at conveyor belt matting (leftovers from local sources) and just hated the work it would take to clean a stall with those in place. Too many unlevel and shifting seams. I’m perfectly happy with them. I used them to cover my 10’ wide shedrow aisle, too. I don’t have as much gravel there, so I supplemented it w/ coarse sand then used spikes to anchor them to the dirt below. Someone here recommended them and they are awesome things. I don’t need the clips in the stalls as the walls do the work of keeping them in place.
Our stall flooring started with several inches of crushed limestone, packed to 96% of the hardness of concrete, topped with the typical heavy 3/4" thick, 4 x 6 foot mats, cut to fit very tightly. They’ve held up great for a couple decades, and there have never been any rat tunnels, or similar, perhaps due to the hard-packed base. But, have also never seen any other sign of rats here.
We bed with pellets, and pull back the corners of the mats every couple of years to scrap out the very small amount of fines that sifts through the seams. Ideally, mats are staggered so that there are not four corners together. The stalls have never had to be re-leveled, other than for the rare removal of the fines.
We have the 1/4" roll mats atop the concrete aisle, in front of the stalls where we groom. They work well for that purpose, but I don’t think would ever lay flat, withstand pawing, etc., or generally hold up, installed inside a stall.
If the caliche soil ( I don’t know what it’s like) does not drain well, then I’d be a little leery of the stall skins. Granted, my experience with them is very limited, but the one barn I’m familiar with that has them, stinks. Our soil isn’t sandy at all where that barn sits, and maybe it’s a foundation issue (i.e. not enough of a gravel base) or what, but that barn = ammonia smell year round, and the stalls are picked daily and kept quite clean.
My interlocking mats (Tru Lok purchased from here: http://www.earthhorse.com/stable-flooring.html) do not shift, peel up, or catch pitchforks at all. They are quite thick and heavy and were properly installed on a level and compacted stonedust base. I think if that’s your experience with interlocking mats, they were either too flimsy or not installed properly. I’ve been very happy with mine.
I was interested in Stall Savers but couldn’t do that because my barn were built partially on an old house foundation so there is concrete underneath the stonedust.
If the base is constructed properly, there are no edges to get caught by a fork. You put in your screenings, then you tamp, then you drag a straight board across and fill in any low spots/take down high spots. You want as close to perfectly level and flat as possible, and if you have that, there will be no edges.
Non interlocking mats expand and contact with the weather, leaving gaps between the mats. If the base is perfect, nothing much changes. If the base isn’t perfect, you start catching a fork. Interlocking mats hold together better through weather changes.
If you’ve cleaned stalls where the fork catches everywhere, it’s because their base wasn’t done well. Time and attention on the base pays off.
And re: grids…I boarded at a barn that installed the grids in their stalls. Staff hated them because they caught tines NONSTOP. They wound up putting mats in on top. Costly error.
My stalls at my old farm were unusually shaped, so I bought some of the 1/4” matting off the roll at TSC to avoid cutting up 3/4” 4x6 mats to fill the gaps. If it was the same stuff you are describing, OP, it didn’t work out for stalls at all. Not only did it shift, but after a couple years, the mats began cracking and falling apart. I presume because they were so thin and light that they’d flex constantly from hoof traffic, which broke them down. Lesson learned.
Yeah… this was my suspicion. Thank you for confirming it.
Looks like I have to bite the bullet on the 3/4" ones. They’re such a HUGE PIA… I need to bring my contractors over to the barn I’m borrowing to show them how NOT to install them, then cut them loose on my barn.
If you’re pouring concrete, consider putting it under your mats in your stalls, too. Contractors understand a perfectly flat and level concrete surface far more than a perfectly level and flat screenings surface.
There are also single piece mats that have been discussed here that can be ordered to fit. Search should turn up that info. Probably not cheap, and heavy equipment is needed to move them, but 100% solves the edge issue.
There’s also a pourable rubber. Looks amazing. Also $$$. But again, no edges.
I have not read the whole thread (which I will do), but I’ll issue a strong, 911 NO to the idea of thin mats.
I’ll be building this year and I have been walking around in a lot of newish barns, checking things out lately.
The problem with thin mats is that they bend and allow the heavy, pointy hooves of horses to press into the base under the stalls, just where those pointy hooves rest. If you want to put concrete under those (another 911 NO from me… been there, worked on that… too hard for horses to live on), you can use shitty thin mats. Of course, they’ll do an even worse job of protecting them from the hardness of the concrete.
But anything else you put under the mats-- clay, the clay/sand mixture used for foundations here in the South or either of those and then crushed, tamped rock-- those things will be challenged by the pointy/heavy hooves. The stiffness of the thicker mats spreads out that weight over a greater surface area and saves your base.
So the question becomes just how good your base is. If you think you can make that impervious to the effect of the way your horse will stand in the same spot all the time (by his window or feeder, for example), you can choose the thinner mats because you don’t need them to do any mechanical work. If you don’t have so much faith in your base or want to make sure that you never need to redo that, do yourself a favor and choose the thicker mats.
When the mats get even gentle dips in them, it makes stall cleaning just a little harder every day. It won’t be awful, with edges turning up and bedding getting stuck under those edges for a long time. But the decision to build wrong will kill your buzz a tad each day/
I disagree that concrete under mats with proper bedding hurts horses.
Thousands of horses that have/were raised on concrete well bedded stalls attest to that.
That is all we had in Europe and we didn’t have any more or less horses having any trouble from the concrete stall floors and much less trouble than with the irregular stall floors poorly maintained floors other than concrete ones bring.
Not saying the rare horse may have problems either place, but the general run of horses don’t.
A local lady used to concrete floors before she came here build her barn with those, no problems ever.
Years later, older, leased her barn to a young race horse trainer.
He took all the concrete out of the stalls on one side, not from two on the other side.
He told me later, that was a huge mistake, stalls and horses were definitively better stabled on the well managed concrete stalls and the now dirt stalls were horrible.
A friend also build a five stall barn with compacted material for the stalls.
After some 12 years of fighting uneven stalls, he poured concrete five years ago and loves it, horses do fine, are very competitive and sound for him.
A local competitor once told me her two horses would get stocked-up behind at a certain show venue.
They were there a week at the time and she blamed the concrete stalls.
I told her not likely and suggested renting a local stable’s stalls by the show barn that had compacted and matted stalls.
Guess what, her horses stocked-up there too.
The horses needed to get out more, legs hosed, maybe standing bandages, a different management, definitely, but the flooring was probably not causing or contributing to their stocking-up.
My point, either way is fine as far as horses comfort is concerned, properly managed.
“But the decision to build wrong will kill your buzz a tad each day/…”
Which is exactly why I’m here picking everyone’s brain for real life scenarios. Better to pay a lot and cry once than pay a little and cry every day.
I have experience with horses living on concrete with mats, in various situations. None of them seem much worse for wear but it’s a moot point for my place. We have this lovely caliche which tamps down with very little encouragement. Heck, when I started to scrape off the old bedding from my stalls, I thought I had hit concrete. Nope. Caliche.
Matter of fact, my builder – who’s also a rancher and a horseman – thinks I can forego any matting and just throw bedding or sand on top of the caliche and be fine. I foresee problems with that So 3/4" mats is likely how I’ll go. I do appreciate everyone’s first hadn’t experience and the discussion about other options though.
I use my stalls as run ins. I don’t bed. Just laid down mats and left 3 ft at the back with sand for drainage. If they are stalled overnight, they don’t sleep on the mats.
I don’t doubt your boatload of evidence from various sources. I only have one form of evidence-- how my own joints felt when working lots of the day in a barn where I was standing on either concrete or thick mats over concrete in the stalls. Also, I have been around enough to know what mats on some kind of base feel like. I can feel the difference in my joints. That’s what called my attention to how little the mats did to mitigate the hardness of concrete.
I don’t know what Caliche is. But if your spot, I might roll the dice with what your builder/rancher/horseman says. I’d try that to see if the Caliche provided some kind of superior cushion plus traction or drainage that worked. I’d try because it sounds like if you hated it, you’d still have to do the kind of site prep to build a flat, tamped base that you would if you laid mats. You have nothing to lose but time by doing this experiment, right?
True, except caliche is notoriously slippery when wet. Imagine crushed chalk… lots of it… and how it doesn’t’ absorb water.
We had to drop the floor about 4" and expose the concrete footers in order to start renovation here. So we’ll use that scraped off caliche to fill low spots and go from there.
On another note, I totally hear you about concrete and mats re: joint pain. I’d so much rather work all day on a dirt floor than poured concrete, even with any kind of mat. its’ absolute torture on my back and calves. The horses seem okay because they’re bed stupidly deep. But not everyone can afford 3’ of shavings in the stalls all the time.
