A few things you need to know about mesh fabric

Fiberglass mesh, also known as alkali-resistant fiberglass mesh, is used for exterior wall insulation layers and interior wall plastering. Its characteristics include alkali resistance and crack resistance. Currently, the market offers a wide variety of fiberglass mesh with varying quality and prices. Therefore, how to distinguish the quality of fiberglass mesh has become a pressing issue for engineering companies. The raw material for fiberglass mesh is fiberglass yarn, which is woven from drawn fiberglass fibers.

Simple ways to identify the quality of fiberglass mesh:

1. Pull and fold: Check if the mesh easily deforms. Easy deformation indicates poor mesh positioning. Fold the mesh for broken threads; if so, it indicates poor yarn quality.

2. Smell the mesh: A pungent odor indicates the addition of urea-based adhesive during coating.

3. Take a weft yarn and observe its density. High-quality mesh will have tightly packed, unbroken fiberglass strands when twisted.

The tricks in fiberglass mesh fabric:

1. Fiberglass mesh fabric is typically sold in rolls of 100 meters, 1 meter wide. However, some dealers sell rolls with a difference of 20 meters, claiming it's due to error, while manufacturers generally guarantee an error of half a meter.

2. The lowest quality fiberglass mesh fabric usually costs around 1.00-1.60 yuan. This type of mesh fabric is often made from recycled glass from beer bottles, produced using a clay crucible drawing process, a prohibited technique in China. The surface coating is also not an alkali-resistant emulsion.

Visually, the workmanship is rough. It's commonly sold by the roll in the market, often with insufficient length and weight, breaks easily after a few folds, has weak joints that shift easily, and can easily puncture the skin. This type of mesh fabric used in insulation layers typically loses its strength after two months. If the mortar is removed and the mesh fabric is taken out, the fiberglass yarn will crumble into powder with a gentle crushing motion.

3. Standard high-quality mesh fabrics all use platinum fiberglass as the base material. Both the material selection and weaving process are meticulously crafted, and the coating emulsion used has excellent alkali resistance. This superior alkali resistance, combined with high warp and weft tensile strength, results in a product with a good feel and excellent application properties, significantly reducing the amount of plastering mortar needed.