Ashen

The average floor will last for years & the best products have a 20 Year Warranty.

Not under normal conditions and use. It’s extremely hard wearing and will easily handle sedans, 4WD’s, SUV’s etc being driven on it.

Industrial Grade epoxies are capable of forklifts, pallet jacks and even planes being moved on it. We did a short video to show the results of a test we did with our work truck to see just how much we could attempt to crack or chip & damage an epoxy coating in 12 months.

This video answers the question “Will an epoxy floor crack or chip?”. Check out the incredible results here...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aItp1nWsRuc

Not if applied correctly. However the best way to ensure that the coating doesn’t peel is to confirm that the installer will be grinding the floor before applying the epoxy. Acid washing (also called acid etching) is a method that does get promoted and it can work but it’s risky due to Acid Residue, seen in Image A.

Acid residue gets left behind after acid etching and can be difficult to remove. This is because once the floor is wet from you scrubbing and hosing the residue is difficult to see and remains that way even when dry. The consequences of not removing it though are disastrous. Image B shows a floor we were called to repair which started to peel just days after the owner installed it. The cause of the peeling was acid residue.

Personally when I just did my own garage recently I ran a grinder over it first. We did a small sample on a garage to show the difference between grinding and acid washing which you can see below. You can be the judge which you think is the best way to prepare your floor.

NO provided that the flooring is not exposed to UV light. But if a plain epoxy floor is exposed to sunlight it will yellow or amber like in Image A (below). Image B shows what the floor looked like when it was first applied. This is the section of the floor that did not get sunlight on it.

There are a number of solutions to prevent your epoxy from turning yellow.

Firstly, don’t expose it to sunlight. This is good in theory but in a garage, for example, a lot of the time when you open the door sunlight will creep in. So that leads to the second solution and that is to cover the epoxy with vinyl flakes because they will not turn yellow. This is called a full flake seamless epoxy floor (shown below).

These flakes are then covered with a 100% UV stable top coat. Polyaspartic, Polyurethane and Polyurea clear top coats are excellent options for UV stability. Polyaspartic coats are fast drying, have no harmful VOC’s and are extremely hard wearing and flexible so they are suitable for very tough conditions. Some polyaspartic top coats have Rapid Cure properties which means they can have traffic on them 4 hours after being applied.

If you use a 100% solids epoxy this is virtually odourless.

If you use a solvent-based epoxy it will smell until it is fully cured and this can be around 10-14 days.

100% solids means that evaporation doesn’t occur in order for the epoxy to cure. Think of honey. It is a 100% solid product IE it is just all 100% honey and if you spill it none of it will evaporate. It will just sit as a sticky mess for ages, or until your dog comes and licks it up. So it releases no gases from evaporation and therefore you don’t smell these gases being released.

100% solids epoxy are like honey and don’t evaporate and release smelly or harmful gases to get hard. The epoxy that is made from the chemicals being blended together are just like all different types of honey they all blend together in the bucket and react with each other to create a reaction that makes them all form one hard substance.

Smelly and potentially harmful types of epoxies are made with solvent bases. Think of ACETONE or nail polish remover. This is a solvent and these solvents evaporating from the epoxy are what you smell until they are fully cured. So if you don’t think it’s a good idea to sniff solvents, like sniffing nail polish remover for example, you need to check that the product you want to install isn’t solvent based.

Not normally and under ordinary day to day use it is basically bullet-proof. But if you try hard enough you can probably scratch it.

One of the commercial bakery jobs we did gave their floor a rigorous test. About 8 hours after we finished the bakers returned to work and dragged a 200kg machine across the floor.

Here’s a pic below of me trying to push the machine myself and I couldn’t shift it at all.

The next image shows the floor close up after they dragged the machine back into place.
You can barely see where they had scratched it and the owners were delighted with the floor’s strength.

Yes.

A picture tells a thousand words so take a look for yourself...

No... but only if it has had a a form of Slip Resistance coating seeded into the top coat.

Common types of slip resistance grits are Aluminium Oxide and Silica and they look and feel like grains of sand.

These grains are pressed into the top coat and once the coat has cured the grains are a permanent part of the floor.

There are different sizes of grains so the slip resistance can be increased or decreased as required.