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Most often a popular choice for both residential and commercial applications, an epoxy coating, will do a lot more than make your garage floor look beautiful. It is also acts as one of the strongest, durable and long lasting coatings that you can apply to your garage floor.
Below are the top 7 reasons why you should consider painting/sealing your concrete flooring to a more stylish and durable epoxy coated floor instead.
1. Dust
It is common knowledge that the use of a concrete floor gathered a lot of dust. Most of the dusty powder you find in your garage, you’ll find, collects on your cars and storage items. An epoxy coating acts like a topical sealer which will seal up the concrete to make it a dust free surface.
Dust can easily gets transferred into your house and acts as a grinder on polished floor. It also gets into woolen carpets and causes tremendous damage to the structure and strength of the fibres!
Top Tip: It is important to hose or pressure wash your car before cleaning it with a sponge or cloth. By simply going straight in to cleaning a car with a cloth or sponge, when it has been covered in a fine layer of dust, acts as a grinding paste causing so many cars lose their shine. The more you clean your car, the more your ‘grinding paste’ is working against you.
2. Concrete is very porous
An unsealed concrete floor acts very much like a sponge by soaking up the vast majority of liquid spilt onto it. When water is spilt on concrete, a damp patch is caused for at least a day or two, and as the water rises to the surface it evaporates and so, your floor dries. However, if oil is spilt onto an unsealed surface, it will soak into the substrate. Once the oil is within the substrate, it will also rise to the surface and unlike the water, it will not evaporate – the floor is now ‘contaminated’. When you apply coating over a contaminated surface, the floor begins to ‘sweat’, the oil from within the substrate rises. The paint then de-laminates. The importance of sealing your garage floor helps to combat and prevent damage to your floors. why you should seal the floor as quickly as possible!
3. Prevention of an Acid/Chemical Attack
Chemical attack to the floor can cause serious damage to the structure of the concrete and will certainly cause weakness and degradation to the surface, making it dusty, unstable, unsafe and at the very least, extremely difficult to keep clean.
Sealing the floor helps to prevent this. However, it is important to make sure that the surface is properly prepared, sound, primed sufficiently and top coated with a coating that is specifically designed to resist the chemicals being used.
4. More Hygienic
To seal a concrete floor can make your cleaning routine a 100 times faster and much easier. Forget all the hard scrubbing. A much easier, simple mopping or wiping of the surface is mostly all that is required. A sealed floor will help prevent bacteria and the spread of contamination. The additional use of an Anti Bacterial Coating enables many people to safely store food in the garage.
Slip resistance / health and safety
Untreated floors can become very slippery for numerous reasons, whether it is just very smooth in the first place, to spillages such as oil or grease, as well as the transfer of water and snow from tyres, etc.
Using an Anti Slip Floor Coating will give you a good clean surface upon which to stand and work safely.
A nice bright environment
Floor coatings are a fantastic way to completely transform garages into a clean, durable and bright environment.
Protection of the surface
It is always best to protect a working surface, even if it is concrete. Water and ice caused by the freeze/thaw cycle, oil spillages, battery leakages all cause deterioration to the surface of the concrete. To seal a floor is always advised to prevent such things from happening.
Epoxy primers and sealers such as Polycote EP Primer, OT Primer and DPM Primer are also designed to have good penetration into the surface and therefore strengthen the surface against impact damage. It is important to remember that once the surface starts to delaminate, the cost of repair or to apply a Self-Levelling product to bring the area back to smooth is a far costlier business than taking the above mentioned precautions ahead of time!
Resale values
We all know, first impressions count. So many people concentrate on walls and ceilings yet so many neglect their floors. Does anyone know how many people walk along looking at the ceiling? Or even the walls for that matter?
What we do know is that everybody is careful where they put their feet and everybody watches where they walk. May we also say, the main reason for this is that no one wants to trip over or tread into something ‘nasty’!.
Your floors are very important and (to use an old expression), can ‘make or break’ a room. A nice bright, clean floor makes a world of a difference to a room and EVERYBODY will see it!
My final piece of advice is – a half painted floor is worse than one that is not painted at all…! So to end on a positive note, should you decide to brighten up your room, please make sure that you to it properly – the correct preparation, the correct primer and the correct top coat and for this, Why not turn now to our further guide – What is the best coating for my garage floor?
FURTHER TECHNICAL HELP REQUIRED?
Thank you for your interest and we hope you have found the above information both interesting and helpful. Please be assured, we can happily (and carefully) guide you through the entire process from the initial inspection of the floor, spotting defects and testing for contamination, right through to the final brush stroke!
Should you wish to speak with someone now, please don’t hesitate to ring our technical helpline on 01234 846400, where a fully qualified team are ready and willing to give as much practical advice and help as you would like.
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