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Cheap Chair Covers Buy and Hire Guide

Cheap Chair Covers

If you have decided the buy chair covers or hire chair covers then you'll be looking to get them as cheaply as possible. If you plan to hire them however you will be asking yourself 'when is cheap too cheap?' and how will I know I'm getting good quality. If you plan to buy chair covers you will be concerned about the purchase price but probably much more concerned about how long they will last and how they will look after 20 washes and 100 washes. On avarage you will hire out chair covers for £2 - 4 per cover (depending on transport and whether you are fitting them or not) so ultimately whether you spend £1-2 more or less buying them is much less important that whether you manage to get 10 rentals or 100 rentals out of them before you need to replace them.

Things to look for in cheap chair covers

Cheap chair covers will need to meet certain criteria in order to be the bargain they appear to be. The criteria you need to look at are the following:

  • Design
  • Material
  • Construction

Design

You need to buy cheap chair covers from a company that has long experience to ensure the chair covers have been designed to provide the best fit and wear characteristics. If buying or hiring a standard cheap chair cover this is vital to ensure the chair cover will fit well. For example - many standard cheap chair covers made for the US market fit well on US model chairs but poorly on European and UK chairs which typically have different sizes and proportions. Many of the cheap chair covers being imported from china are made without any research or reference to the actual abnqueting chairs in use in the country they are iported into and will consequently offer a poor fit and poor value for money.

Material

The fabric used for cheap chair covers has to both look good and feel good but equally importantly it has to wear well and be crease resistant and easy to launder. When using PolyCotton type fabrics the best weight for a chair cover is fabric that is around 195gsm in weight as lighter weights will wear poorly. It is very important that with colours including Ivory and Cream that the fabric has been 'Vat' Dyed' rather than 'Reactive' Dyed'. The vat dying process is typically used for items such as workwear which are designed for intensive laundering with minimal colour fading. Polyester should be of a similar weight but you will find chair covers that cost a little more than the really cheap ones may have a slghtly heavier weight and only cost slightly more. This is often better value as the cost difference is small but especially with white and ivory the increased opacity of the fabric will reduce the tendency for the chair to be visible when really cheap fabrics are used in cheap chair covers.

Construction

Really cheap chair covers often cut corners that will leave you much worse off in even the short term than higher quality ones. One way saving may have been made in the manufacturing process is to not overlock the hems. This won't be apparent at first unless you check the hems on the inside but threads will quickly star coming loose and the cheap chair cover will rapidly start to disintegrate after a few washes. The joins will also be weaker and have less resistant to splits caused in usage.

Another important feature in the construction of a cheap chair cover to look for is whether it hs double stitching in all the areas subject to the most stress and strain.

Check with the manufacturer what areas of the cheap chair cover have double stitching. These areas should include the seat joins with the skirt of the chair covers and the joins of the seat to the back. Special attention to re-inforcement of the seams needs to be paid to the area where tha back panels, skirt, and seat pad meet as these get the most strain when people slump on their seats which can cause tearing.