I am setting up a home electronics lab for projects with my kids, currently ages 4 through 10. What type of flooring would work best?
We will be doing art projects in the same room, so we need something easy to clean (no carpet). I would prefer something relatively inexpensive as well. I have found lots of information about flooring for a pro setting, but I have not found recommendations for home use.
ESD is a matter of how much intermittency or damage you can afford. In a medial device, or aerospace application or other industry the costs are very very high into the hundreds of millions (or a human life) for a failure. In these cases every available option to mitigate ESD risk is taken, which include floor mats, wrist straps, humidity control (60% if I remember right), making sure no materials that promote ESD (like paper and plastic) come into contact with electronics and even monitoring the local electric field. The cost in time and money is also high.
Even in a regular production environment, the costs can be high (for scraping a few hundred dollars worth of components).
In your case, since your costs of failure are quite low (if you ESD'ed a MOSFET, that's ~1$ and tens of minutes to troubleshoot whereas a mat is 10's of dollars or more) and the costs of ESD mitigation would be higher than a few components, it may not be necessary to go to such great lengths for ESD lab coats and ESD flooring. It might be better to just use wrist straps and an ESD mat for educations sakes and call it good.
For a proper ESD floor, the floor needs to be conductive and connected to ground (with 1MΩ of resistance between the user and the floor), proper footwear that is conductive is worn with a foot strap. I'm not aware of any home materials that would satisfy the conductive requirement.
What is most important is a static dissipative bench e.g unpainted wood is ideal. You can put an antistatic mat if you want, but in a fairly humid environment wood is fine. I dislike pvc antistatic mats that melt under soldering heat, and find wood a better work surface.
If it has a metal frame then connect that to mains ground via a 1M resistor.
Train your kids to work with bare arms resting on the wood, and to contact the bench first
A bare wire or metal angle/strip/foil connected to mains ground by a high value resistor (1M) stapled along the corner or front edge where you will touch it is another common idea.
Chair covers can sometimes be static generators - staple cotton fabric on if this happens. Modern chairs can be a bit of a nightmare of insulated plastic bits.
Bare feet not flip-flops-on-vinyl are better.
Make sure to have an earthed soldering iron. Low voltage soldering stations are much better. If it is chinese you must test it is actually grounded. (I have seen two that weren't grounded, and one of them, supposed to be a low voltage iron, but actually had the tip wired live to mains).
Get a plug-in RCD or change the wall socket for an RCD/GFCI for the whole workbench. (saves your ears from swmbo complaining its too dangerous for a 4yo to be rewiring the toaster). Arrange to have a single visible switch that can turn the entire work bench off at one point. Your kids love to leave soldering irons, glue guns, flame throwers etc running overnight. (I never do this, no siree). Fires while we sleep are my #1 home worry.
Static disippative vinyl floor is common in many manufacturing industries not just electronics. Asking at an industrial flooring supplier is likely to get you an offcut of vinyl a good size to go under and around the bench as far as your chair rolls. (industrial vinyl is also solid not paper with a film of vinyl)
My earliest shop used 1/4" Masonite over top of the existing (very) short pile commercial-space carpet that was installed when we rented the space. The substrate beneath the carpet was concrete and we simply used Tapcon screws to hold the Masonite in place.
The local ESD specialists told us that as long as we maintained reasonable humidity levels, the resistivity of the Masonite would be in the Dissipative range. This was born out by regular testing.
When we eventually purchased our shop space, the old Masonite and carpet was replaced with standard 12" x 12" tile right on top of the concrete. We didn't have enough money for ESD tiles, so now we are stuck with stripping and waxing with ESD wax on a far too-frequent basis.
For a simple shop and provided you can maintain a decent humidity level, I would seriously consider a Masonite floor.
It would be much simpler and less expensive to cover the bench with an anti-static mat and install a wrist strap earthing point.
