Base Coats: Why Epoxy Outperforms Polyaspartic
Perform a Google search for “garage floor coatings”, “epoxy flooring” or something similar and you’ll quickly find confusing, conflicting and downright misleading information on what is needed to produce a beautiful, durable and long lasting garage floor coating. In this post we’ll outline the steps involved in the garage floor coating process. Although the steps to produce a durable high quality floor are very straightforward, one step in particular has caused some confusion. Our goal is to clear up the confusion so that you can be equipped to make a smart and informed decision when choosing a flooring contractor.
Let’s start with floor preparation. The industry standard for floor preparation is machine grinding the concrete surface using diamond inserts. Other methods are commonly used, but nothing is as effective in opening up the pores in the concrete as diamond grinding the floor. The surface must be porous enough for the base coat to penetrate into the concrete slab. Next, apply a moisture blocking, two part crack repair material to fill any settlement cracks, pits or other imperfections in your concrete.
After the prep work is complete, we’re ready to apply the base coat. Here’s where things get confusing for many who aren’t familiar with the garage floor coating process and materials involved. The purpose of the base coat is to penetrate deep into and become one with the concrete slab to receive the decorative flake to follow.
The base coat must also be equipped with the ability to block damaging moisture that pushes up from beneath the concrete slab. If it isn’t, it can cause a coating to become detached from the concrete slab. Some companies use a polyaspartic base coat, and others use an epoxy base coat. The critical question is, which base coat meets the above criteria?
Some contractors promote polyaspartic base coats as being far superior than epoxy base coats. Why?
Speed = More Completed Jobs = More Profit
You see, after the base coat is applied and the flake is broadcasted into the wet base coat, the base coat needs to dry before the installer can move on to the final steps.
Guess which material dries extremely fast?
Yup, polyaspartic dries waaaaaaay faster than epoxy……. about 30 minutes for polyaspartic compared to at least 2 hours for epoxy.
When used as a base coat, installers are able to complete large garage floors in a single day, which increases their overall profits. Unfortunately, faster drying polyaspartic does not produce a higher quality floor. Why? A fast drying polyaspartic base coat simply doesn’t have the time to penetrate deep into the concrete slab and provide the moisture blocking protection that a slower drying epoxy base coat can.
To compensate for the lack of moisture blocking properties in a polyaspartic base coat, a moisture barrier needs to be applied to the concrete prior to the base coat being applied. A moisture blocking primer epoxy is recommended when using polyaspartic as a base coat if the concrete has more than 3 pounds or 5.5% moisture. This is because moisture can affect the life of the flooring and cause the coating to peel. A moisture barrier helps the coating bond and cure properly on the concrete (the epoxy we used is equipped with 8 lbs of moisture vapor emissions blocking power making the primer layer unnecessary). This extra cost combined with the more expensive polyaspartic (compared to epoxy) makes the square foot cost of an all polyaspartic floor higher than an epoxy/polyaspartic floor, while offering no clear advantages. That unnecessary extra cost is passed onto the customer.
While we do offer all polyaspartic coatings, we highly recommend a moisture blocking epoxy base coat and polyaspartic top coat.
Hopefully this information clears up any confusion, but if you still have questions, feel free to reach out to our team.