Installing floor on top of foam pad residue

Q: I am installing Engineered flooring in my basement (it is concrete). Currently it has glued down carpet. When I started ripping the carpet up it left a thin layer of foam. Can I install the flooring on top of that foam or do I need to remove it? Can it be the underlay for the engineered floor? The engineered floor will be floating and glued together (tongue and groove, not click).

A: I would scrape as much of the pad away as possible using a flat blade trowel. You want the floor to be as flat as possible. Definitely this padding is not a substitute for the padding that comes with your engineered floor which is designed no doubt to serve in part as a vapour retardant to help protect your floor from moisture coming through the concrete or condensing on the concrete.

Follow up: Thanks for your response, I took the advice and wasn’t that hard to scrape up with a sharp floor scraper.

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