One of the most expensive of all the splashback materials, stainless steel is a beautifully modern and clean choice for your kitchen. Stainless steel splashbacks can be installed directly onto plasterboard, or even over existing tiles with an appropriate contact adhesive.
Steel splashbacks can be bought pre-cut to suit standard cooktop widths and cabinet heights, or custom made, depending on the shape of your kitchen and your design requirements. As with all splashback surfaces, custom cut designs will cost considerably more.
Stainless steel splashbacks mornally come in 0.5 to 1.5mm thicknesses of grade 304 stainless steel, which provides excellent resistance to corrosion. Joints for stainless steel splashbacks should be properly welded together.
Maintenance
One of the drawbacks with stainless steel is that, because it's a beautiful, reflective and uniform surface, marks on it will be fairly prominent. The sorts of marks that will be most obvious include food smudges, fingerprints and water marks. For that reason, you'll need to be reasonably vigilant with your cleaning if you're keen to maintain the pristine look of your splashback. Thankfully, the most that normally requires is a good wipe down with a damp cloth.
Pricing
Stainless steel's not necessarily cheap - although a simple splashback won't cost you the earth. Custom shapes, sizes and cutouts in particular will lead to a far more expensive splashback, so if budget's a concern it's a very good idea to design with this in mind.
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