I live in a house filled with heavy furniture and large plant pots. The carpet, such as it is, takes a hammering from all this weight, leaving unsightly, flattened patches which tend to fade noticeably less.
Today’s invention is a beermat-sized pad made of translucent plastic. From one side, a matrix of spines points downwards, whilst the top surface remains flat (a bit like a very stiff hairbrush).
The spines are three cm or so in length and act as an inverted bed of nails, supporting the heavy objects, without becoming themselves distorted and without flattening the carpet fibres.
Light can penetrate to the carpet pretty effectively and the pads can be linked at the edges in order to spread any loads more widely, if required.