Casters are little wheels designed to roll and swivel with ease to make our furniture, appliances and office equipment move smoothly and easily. You rarely notice how casters make our lives easier until you try to move a crib away from a wall or move a chair to a meeting room when they don’t have casters affixed to the ends of their legs. Today, everything from our heaviest home appliances such as washers, dryers, stoves and refrigerators to our lightest storage boxes come with casters.
Casters help us move our large items easier, but they can also simplify our daily tasks such as cleaning, sweeping or rearranging. Cleaning or sweeping under the fridge and stove is nearly impo ...
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Casters are little wheels designed to roll and swivel with ease to make our furniture, appliances and office equipment move smoothly and easily. You rarely notice how casters make our lives easier until you try to move a crib away from a wall or move a chair to a meeting room when they don’t have casters affixed to the ends of their legs. Today, everything from our heaviest home appliances such as washers, dryers, stoves and refrigerators to our lightest storage boxes come with casters.
Casters help us move our large items easier, but they can also simplify our daily tasks such as cleaning, sweeping or rearranging. Cleaning or sweeping under the fridge and stove is nearly impossible if your fridge and stove aren’t equipped with casters. Re-organizing your bedroom is a chore if your bed doesn’t have casters equipped with breaks so you can easily move it from one corner to another.
Casters are available with or without breaks. Hospital beds, gurneys, carts that hold health-monitoring equipment and other industrial carts typically use casters with brakes for the needed stability. Most brakes are simple levers that can be depressed and released with your foot.
Not all casters are made of the same materials, and not all casters are suitable for all floor types. Caster wheels can be made of soft or hard rubber, metal, wood, plastic and sometimes grooved aluminum. When purchasing casters, be sure to take the type of floors in your home into consideration. You might not want to use metal casters on wood flooring for fear of ruining your hardwood and plastic casters are known to skid on hardwood floors and slip out from under guests. You want to carefully match your wheel material to your floor type to prevent any accidents or damage.
Broken casters are easily replaced when needed. Most casters are designed with either a bracket which is screwed into your furniture or a steel screw on one side which screws into a pre-drilled hole on your furniture. The only difficulty with replacing a caster is tipping your furniture over so you can affix the new one.
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