Rubber bricks as yard floor?

[Lisamd]

Planning ahead to building my own yard next year - i was thinking about using rubber bricks in the yard area as the base. My general thought was that in the winter when it is awful weather the horses could have their stable doors open and wonder in their own section of the yard too, so i thought these would be a good investment and safer that concrete.

Has anyone got experience of them?

 

[Chermar]

I don't have any experience of the bricks but I do with playground mats.......

My dad was lucky enough to be right place right time a couple of years ago when one of the councils was redoing all the playgrounds, so they where ripping up the old tiles 80x80 so he thought they would do the stables. Which they did and still have, excellent job. Anyway we had so many we did the dog's pen in them too excellent for so many reasons, then we had the winter we had!! They did freeze and get slippy, maybe our mats wheren't rough enough to allow for frost etc but if they had a roughness to them I don't think they would wear as well. I had actually looked about buying more of these as they really did make excellent beds but the price was a bit scary........ so I'll wait till they are ripping the playground up again!!

Don't know if that was helpful or not but that's my experience. Good luck with the house building!! How exciting!!

 

[millitiger]

they are gorgeous and much safer than concrete but v.expensive, a lot of yards go for the cheaper option of laying the heavy duty mats in walkways etc.

 

[MillionDollar]

They are very very expensive, we've just had our large horse walker laid with them and that was £5,000 I dread to think what a yard would cost.

Also they are very hard to sweep and keep clean, and I've been told that many yards in Europe are ripping them up as they have found that horses (mainly dressage horses) are not doing any walking on concrete and are therefore picking up many injuries. The problem with these bricks is they don't let the horses' foot rotate properly as the shoe sticks to the rubber.