Industrial Flooring In Your Garage

Industrial Flooring is a term that is often thrown around in the epoxy garage floor business.  It is our opinion that there are certainly different grades of epoxies out there.  Likely thousands of formulations by at least hundreds of suppliers.  The chemical makeup of these are for various applications of substrate, humidities, temperatures, just to name a few.  Therefore, the combination of these formulations make it important in selecting the right flooring system for your application.

Industrial Flooring For Warehouse and Vehicle Maintenance Shops

Industrial Flooring installed by Amazing Garage Floors

When you know you will have heavy use on an industrial floor, it makes sense to use a high build, or 100% solids epoxy formulation.  This is a floor we completed for a trucking company and will perform for many years with semi trucks and trailers driving over them.  Additionally, there will be lots of tools dropped, creepers, and tool boxes being rolled and likely drug across this floor.  This type of work will scratch and chip away into the floor, and it’s essentiall designed to stand up to this abuse.  The concrete is likely 6 or more inches thick, and has been in place for many decades, so this 100% solids epoxy installation worked out great.

High Solids or 100% Solids in Garages

While you may find that industrial flooring is a great option for epoxy garage floors in your research, it is true.  However, there are a few reasons why it may not be right for your home or garage.  One key reason is the lack of a moisture barrier beneath the garage floor in garage construction in many parts of the country.  Failure to install a physical moisture barrier or install a moisture vapor barrier treatment may cause a catastrophic failure of a high or 100% solids epoxy garage floor.  In the photo below you can see the moisture that caused this 100% solids industrial floor product to fail.

industrial flooring product failure due to moisture

 

Another issue we see in the industry is not preparing the concrete with a sufficient grit of diamond if diamond grinding the floor.  These high solid epoxies require additional texture to properly adhere to the floor.  If diamond grinding in preparation for a 6 grit or 16 grit diamond is suggested in order to satisfy the requirements.  Preparation is the most important part of any epoxy flooring installation, and we certainly recommend on the high side of chart below (CSP5) for a high solids/high build epoxy flooring installation.  Shot blasting or scarification is often the best way to achieve the results on high build industrial flooring.

Industrial Flooring Preparation Chart
Photo courtesey of Graco Sprayers

 

Industrial Flooring In Garages Summary

If you are looking for an industrial flooring system in your garage these are major things that you need to take a look at.  The floors will require that you do more preparation than most garage floor contractors are doing.  Look for a moisture barrier being installed, the proper preparation for the mils of thickness of epoxy being installed.  This requires a lot more preparation with larger diamonds in most cases or shot blasting to a CSP 5 most likely.

For more information on industrial flooring options in the garage, that does take all the needed steps in preparation and installation of an epoxy garage floor.  Visit www.amazinggaragefloors.net