What You Need to Know about Epoxy Floor Coating
The first thing you should know is that garage epoxy floor coatings are not like normal floor paint and not all epoxies are the same. So what exactly are epoxy floors? Epoxy floorings usually consist of two layers based on chemical or water. The epoxy flooring includes a Resin portion and a Hardener portion similar to epoxy adhesive. Regular garage floor paints are oil-based or water-based. High-quality epoxy floor paints are neither one-piece, oil-based nor water-based, and not all epoxies are the same, and you need to know why, so you do not need to make the floor a second or third time. if you want to see our epoxy garage floor services you can see with this link.
What You Should Know About Epoxy Floor coating
If you have never been interested in epoxy paints before and just applied another category of paint such as semi-gloss or enamel. After the epoxy floor coating application, you will forget all the beauties you know and add a new beauty to your life. Placing the epoxy flooring in the same category as traditional garage floor paints is similar to saying that Volkswagen Beetle is the same as Ferrari, because both are similar to cars .Epoxy flooring is usually a two-piece coating that you mix rather than a single component. An epoxy flooring will adhere better to epoxy garage floor or any concrete floor than traditional oil-based water or enamel paint, Epoxy glue type will stick and will be better.
One-Piece Epoxy Coating and Coatings That Do Not Require Ground Preparation
One thing we know for sure is that the one-piece epoxies we tried didn’t work. When using colored scales, they are thin, difficult to work with but tend to be a good idea. In heavier flake applications, flakes can actually sink into concrete, meaning epoxy is very thin or absent in concrete. That is why we do not use color flakes in our commercial coatings. The basement is designed to be slightly thinner for immersion in concrete and works great for what it is designed for. However, we do not hold the scales well and do not want any coating to replace it. That’s why our Ultra Soldier, Spectrum flake Chip and spectrum epoxies are very thick and viscous. When you discard the chips, they remain on the surface and under it an epoxy coating remains.
Epoxy floor paints that don’t need floor prep leave us scratching our heads. Floor prep is critical on all epoxy flooring jobs. We would never ever do a floor without prepping it and neither should you. Every year there seems to be some new magic formula that hits the market with outlandish promises. We make and will continue to make what has worked in the past and will continue to work int he future. Don’t fall for marketing hype, we wish you good luck if you do.
Do I Need A Primer For The Job?
The answer is not always. A primer makes for a better job because it adds another layer of epoxy and seals the floor at the same time. For most garage floor epoxy applications a primer is not needed. Our Spectrum floor coating& spectrum garage floor epoxies are self priming. Some flooring epoxies will claim to be a primer, an epoxy and a topcoat all in one. That may be so but they will be masters of none as the saying goes. If you have any kind of heavy duty traffic you need a primer and a true topcoat and for industrial floor epoxy applications you need a primer, thick epoxy layer and then a topcoat.
There are times when you need a primer for even a simple garage application such as if your floor is pitted from road salts, was not a high grade of concrete when it was poured and is now granular or chalky, in poor condition with exposed aggregate due to age or is oil stained etc. A primer is also great to use when you need to extend the coverage of the epoxy layer since the epoxy is now going over a sealed surface rather than porous concrete. If your floor is not typical we suggest you talk to one of our experts before purchasing and applying any type of epoxy coating. We have primers for just about any floor condition.
What Is The Difference Between Garage Epoxies and Garage Paints?
It is essential that you know the differences between garage epoxy floor coting and garage paints and the differences between different types of epoxies. Regular garage floor paints are single component products made in either oil or water based formats. They’re usually used for wall and ceiling applications and are not suited for applications like epoxy flooring that can have anything from heavy foot traffic to vehicles weighing many tons rolling over it. Epoxy floor paints are mostly a two component product whereas regular floor paints are a single component. Epoxies consist of a Part A which is the resin/pigment part and the Part B which is the hardener part. Much like epoxy glue when you mix Part A & Part B together they harden to form a very durable coating. That is if you use a good quality epoxy. The majority of water based epoxies are inferior and are no better than regular semi-gloss paint. A lot of epoxy flooring paints that are solids based are also inferior but it’s much harder to tell which are inferior and which are high quality. In the following paragraphs we will teach you how to tell the difference between real industrial grade floor epoxy paints from those that are just industrial grade in name only.
What is an Epoxy Topcoat and Why Is It needed?
First thing you need to know is that epoxies and topcoats are two completely different products. Epoxies are either a base coat or a middle coat but always a coat that gets a coating over it, which we call a topcoat. Why? because topcoats are made to be chemically harder than the epoxy coatings they go over. Epoxies are made to provide thickness and adhesion. Spectrum Topcoats are made with high quality urethane to provide durability and UV protection. So it’s crucial you know about topcoats. Please be aware of the fact that applying a clear version of an epoxy over a pigmented layer of the same epoxy does nothing, even if you add in UV additives. It’s still an epoxy and not a topcoat. It doesn’t have the impact rating nor the abrasion rating needed long term durability.
Any epoxy floor coating product that claims to not need a topcoat is a product to avoid. If you’re applying it in your garage your hot twisting/turning tires will wear the high gloss finish off in no time. This applies to even 100% solids epoxies. Even though they are of higher quality they are nowhere near as hard as they have to be for vehicle generated abrasion. More detail on topcoats is explained in the next section below.
What You Don’t Have To Know About Epoxy Floor Coatings
Just as important to knowing how to know a quality epoxy flooring product is to know how to spot useless information. There are other ratings you may see we buying floor coatings but they’re mostly useless marketing hype at best and what we call fiction. Ratings such as compressive strength and tensile strength are meaningless to all but the most complicated/specialized applications. Certainly not relevant for 99.9% of epoxy flooring applications.Mostly all epoxy floor paints have a compressive strength much higher than 5000 psi. 5000 psi concrete is about the hardest concrete floors you’ll find 95% of the time. So that means most floor epoxies have a higher crush rating than the concrete it’s going on. Unless you are rolling an M1 Abrams Tank onto your floor the compressive strength rating is meaningless. We do a lot of work with our Military forces and that comes into play sometimes but for 99% of the other floors in the world you are just not going to place a load onto your floor that is going to crush your slab! The same goes for the tensile strength, you’re just not going to be able to put anything on the floor that will come anywhere near to the breaking point to all but the cheapest floor epoxy paints. The key factors for epoxy are pot life, thickness, type of epoxy and the hardness of the final topcoat that will be exposed to the wear and tear of the traffic on it.
Another meaningless criteria is cost per mils! That means nothing because what that is saying is that the more you get of an inferior epoxy the better the buy/epoxy it is. Bad epoxy is bad epoxy no matter how much of it you get! Stick to the cost per square foot and how long your epoxy will last and by last we mean how long will it stay looking new, not just stay stuck to your floor. Don’t get distracted by meaningless numbers or guarantees regarding peeling. Lifetime guarantee means nothing if your floor gets ugly in a year or so. Lifetime guarantees don’t guarantee against wear or dulling. Abrasion wear on an inferior epoxy will dull it in no time. Which means you now have a floor that looks dirty, old, yellowed and worn out that is guaranteed to be stuck to your floor for life! Isn’t that great, you either have to live with what you end up with or spend more than double to redo your floor.
What are the differences between all your various epoxy floor systems?
Spectrum Garage Epoxy System is hot tire proof as are all our epoxy coating systems. It consists of 100% solids military grade epoxy as your base coat. 8lbs of color flakes that you broadcast into the epoxy while wet. Then the next day you apply two layers of our heavy duty urethane topcoat that has an 20mg abrasion loss rating. If you are in a climate where there’s lots of road salts or you use jack stands, floor jacks, large rolling tools or have off road type vehicles. We recommend you upgrade the topcoat to the military grade version that has only a 4 mg abrasion loss rating. It’s chemically hardened to give you the highest level of protection and you only need to do one coat. Also included is the notched squeegee, rollers, mixer, etch solution and nonslip additive.
Spectrum Garage Epoxy System is our top of the line garage kit. It consists of extra thick 100% military grade epoxy, 20lbs of color flakes and four layers of our 20mg abrasion loss rated topcoat. You can upgrade to the military topcoat and only have to do one coat. In addition to all the accessories in the Armor Chip kit you also get the spike soles to walk in the wet epoxy as you are applying the color flakes.