Professional
Flake Epoxy Flooring
in Huntsville and beyond

Is this the right system for your floor?

People usually arrive having picked a finish from a photograph. That is a fine place to start and a poor place to finish, because the floor has to survive the room it is in. We work through it in this order.

Start with how the floor gets cleaned

This is the question that settles most of it. A floor that gets swept and occasionally mopped can take almost anything. A floor that gets hosed down, hit with degreaser and steam cleaned every night is a much shorter list, and in a commercial kitchen it usually comes down to urethane cement. People tend to start with how a floor should look. We start here, because a finish that cannot survive the cleaning routine will not last no matter how good it looked on day one.

Then what goes on it and what gets dropped

Hot tires pull at a coating in a way ordinary traffic does not, which is why garage floors get specified differently than basements. Forklift wheels, pallet corners and dropped tools argue for a thicker build. Chemicals matter less than people expect and more than they realize at the same time: a spill that gets wiped up is nothing, a spill that sits overnight is a different conversation.

Then moisture, which decides more than anything

Concrete on grade can pass vapor up through the slab for its whole life. If that moisture has nowhere to go and you put a sealed coating on top, pressure builds under the film and eventually lifts it in sheets. This is the most common cause of a floor failing that had nothing to do with the installer’s workmanship. It is also testable before anybody commits, and on a slab we have doubts about we would rather test than hope.

What goes wrong

• A coating that peels in sheets. Almost always a bond failure, and bond failures are prep failures. Either the slab was not ground open, or something was left on it, or moisture underneath pushed the film off. The finish itself is rarely the culprit.
• Bubbles and pinholes. Air coming out of the concrete while the resin is still wet, usually because the slab was warming up as it cured. Timing the pour against the temperature of the slab rather than the air is how you avoid it.
• A floor that turned yellow. Ordinary epoxy is not UV stable. In a garage with a window or a patio in the sun it will amber over time. That is why the top coat on our systems is polyaspartic, which holds its color.

Looking after it

On a coated garage floor, wipe spills rather than letting them sit. Brake fluid and some solvents will soften a coating given long enough contact, though nothing you are likely to drop will hurt it in the time it takes to get a rag.

Day to day, a resin floor wants sweeping and a damp mop with a pH neutral cleaner. That is the entire routine. What it does not want is anything harsh or abrasive, because a floor that gets scrubbed with the wrong thing loses its gloss long before it loses its protection.