Questions Sudbury Businesses Ask About Epoxy Flooring

For most properties here, yes. The reason is specific to this climate. Sudbury stays below freezing for months at a time, so salt brine that comes off your vehicle soaks into the slab and stays there rather than drying out between thaws. Come spring it releases and takes the top layer of concrete with it, which is the flaking and grey dust you see near the door every April. A sealed floor never absorbs it, so the cycle never starts. A properly installed system should give fifteen to twenty years, which compares well against patching or replacing a spalled slab.

A flake system with a polyaspartic top coat, and in deep winter often a full polyaspartic build. Standard epoxy needs the slab above roughly ten degrees to cure properly, and an unheated Sudbury garage is nowhere near that from October to April. Polyaspartic keeps curing where epoxy stalls, and it does not yellow. We measure the slab temperature rather than the air temperature, and bring heat when the reading calls for it.

Salt is a chemical problem that sealing the concrete solves outright. Sand is mechanical. Grit tracked in on tires sits on the floor and gets ground into the surface every time a wheel turns, which wears through a thin or soft coating at the tire tracks long before anything else fails. Sudbury uses a lot of winter sand. It is why we build proper thickness and specify a hard, abrasion-resistant top coat here, and why sweeping is the single most useful thing you can do for your floor.

Usually, but the moisture reading comes first. Bedrock does not drain the way deep soil does and it can hold water against the underside of a slab, which drives moisture up through the concrete and lifts a coating from below. We test before quoting. Where the reading is elevated we specify a primer built for damp slabs. Where it is beyond what any primer will handle, we tell you not to coat it rather than take the job.

Nearly always, though usually not by coating over it. Peeling means the bond failed, and new resin over a failing layer fails with it. The old coating comes off by grinding, we test the exposed slab for moisture, repair the concrete and install a system specified against whatever caused the original failure. If only the top coat has worn and the floor underneath is sound, that is a much cheaper scuff and recoat. Send us a photo and we will tell you which one you are likely looking at.