Floor coatings
What is a concrete floor coating?
A concrete floor coating is a resin system bonded to prepared concrete: a base coat, usually a flake broadcast, and a topcoat that takes the wear.
The short version
- A coating is a bonded film with real thickness, not a color rolled onto the surface.
- The usual build is a base coat, flake broadcast into it, and a clear topcoat over both.
- The concrete gets ground first, because the bond is made in the profile grinding opens up.
- A coating changes the surface of a slab. It does not change what is happening under it.
- Clear View Surface Solutions installs a polyurea basecoat, decorative flake in a color blend you pick, and a polyaspartic UV-stable topcoat over diamond-ground concrete.
What the material is
A floor coating is a liquid resin that goes down on prepared concrete and hardens into a solid film stuck to it. That is the whole of it. The resin can be polyurea, polyaspartic or epoxy, and those names describe the chemistry doing the sticking and the hardening rather than anything you can see once the floor is finished.
It goes down in layers. A base coat wets into the opened-up concrete and grabs it. Flake gets broadcast into that base while it is still wet, if the floor is getting flake. Then a clear topcoat goes over the whole thing and locks the flake down. What you walk on is the topcoat, and everything below it is protected by whatever that top layer does.
What it is for
Two things, and they matter about equally to most people. The first is the slab itself. Bare concrete takes in whatever lands on it, oil, brake fluid, salt water off a vehicle, and it dusts under a tire and comes apart at the surface where water gets in and freezes. A film on top takes that instead of the concrete taking it.
The second is how the room looks and how it cleans. A coated floor is one continuous surface with no open pores for dirt to sit in, so it gets swept and mopped instead of scrubbed. In a garage in the southwest Twin Cities metro most of that is winter, because a wet vehicle drips salt water on the floor all season and all of it lands on the coating.
It also buys back the room. A basement floor that was bare concrete becomes somewhere you would put a workout room or a workbench.
Where a coating is not the answer
A coating is a surface. If the concrete under it has a problem, the coating goes along with the problem. A slab that has settled, heaved or cracked because something moved underneath it is a concrete question first, and putting a film over it does not change what the ground is doing.
Water coming up through the slab is the other one. Concrete on grade carries moisture up through itself, and a floor that reads high has to be handled before anything bonds to it. That is why the slab gets checked, and why a floor that has been damp since it was poured gets a different conversation than a dry one.