Comment by icodestuff
3 days ago
I wanted Dekton for my new countertops. Its list of resistances to various kitchen mishaps was extremely impressive. Every other material we looked at has at least one weakness. Dekton was marketed as having none. It also looked quite good, being available in lots of colors and patterns. The real drawback was going to be the price. It's basically the most expensive countertop material (or was, 2 years ago).
And then a ~3x3" sample I was looking at Home Depot slipped and fell on the floor, from under 3 feet in height. It landed more or less flat on its face and absolutely exploded over ~25 square feet. The internal stresses in this stuff are nuts. Then I found YouTube videos evaluating it. Everything they claim seems to be accurate, except for shatter resistance. Any sort of focused stress (one video dropped a bearing ball from a couple feet up) will absolutely wreck it.
Ended up going with a high-quality quartz instead. Not as much heat resistance as Dekton, but it won't break if something falls out of a cabinet.
I used to cut this stuff as part of a previous job. Imagine a kitchen-sized cnc water jet/saw.
We had to cut a prescribed pattern out of the edges of the slab to relieve stresses. Even at 2cm thickness it was slower to cut than any 3cm natural stone.
Part of the job was smashing the offcuts with a sledge to fit more stone per dumpster. Smashing dekton is like when you get a bad hit with a baseball bat and you feel it through your elbows and shoulders. Every time, like nothing else.
I think it looks like crap. Maybe good for high traffic floors or wall treatments where weight is a concern.
There are third-party tests that mostly validate this. Dekton appears to be rather more prone to breakage due to impact than most other countertop materials.
Is there a reason they don't just anneal the slabs to remove the internal stresses?
That tension between the skin and the center are probably what give it strength. Annealing it would make it less prone to shatter so violently, but would also make it break easier.
Check out prince rupert drops for another example of this.
I think it would gain toughness, but lose hardness by annealing.
I wound up using a single whole slab of Dekton as a vertical backsplash highlight but otherwise used Silestone for the countertops precisely because nothing was impacting the backsplash but it was way more possible on the countertop.
> It's basically the most expensive countertop material (or was, 2 years ago).
You should see some of the more unique "statement" showoff-level marbles and quartzites out there. ;)
You're right, I forgot about expensive marbles and quartzite. Wasn't really looking at marble because of its weaknesses on paper, but yeah, quartzite was definitely more expensive than Dekton.