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Treatment of Cement Floors
I have a small distillery with a cement floor. A couple of years ago I treated it with acid and painted it with a paint made especially for cement. Unfortunately, that is now coming off.
Can anyone recommend a type of treatment that will last? Will the flooring treatment used in garages, I believe it’s an epoxy that you can install yourself, last over time? The mash and the distillate that I produce eats the paint off.
Thank you for any help in this regard.
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5 Replies
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DIY epoxy will probably fail. Consumer epoxy is just “OK” for a consumer garage, but they can and do fail with the light duty of a home garage. Old concrete that isn’t ground, cleaned, and etched properly and overlaid with a consumer epoxy will most likely not endure 3,000lb pallets rolling across it for very long.
We had our production floor professionally ground, cracks filled, ground again, and sealed. It’s not a gloss finish, but it’s pretty darn smooth and makes cleanup with a squeegee a dream. We strip and reseal it every year (mostly because I don’t like scuffs in the floor) which is inexpensive.
I think the price of the work was about $3-4 per square foot, and after watching the professionals and their machines (much better than what you can rent), it’s something I absolutely would not want to attempt myself. I’m pretty sure they took 1/4″ or more of concrete off the higher spots, which would take years of work with one of the Home Depot rental grinders.
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We used a high end DIY industrial epoxy. It looks good, fills in small holes, but stains with time. One thing we were incredibly with cautious was (and the recommendation of the industrial paint store) was power washing then degreasing the heck out of it. Without doing that, oil will resurface and cause bubbling (a small amount of which we still see in trouble areas). Our biggest killer is the metal bands on IBC totes on a wet floor leaving rust marks.
For about 1k plus labour, we can repaint an 1800 sq foot distilling room once a year to keep it fresh, or just let it go.
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From my experience, I recommend 2 part epoxy and then 2 part aliphatic urethane over that. You can just do the 2-part aliphatic urethane. Both will require concrete grinding to take off the top surface so that the paints will stick. I did epoxy only and it gets very blotchy with alcohol on it… and you end up with a lot of alcohol on it. 2 part aliphatic is better at not getting blotchy from spills, but it is a thinner finish and you can more easily get scratches and goudges that get to the bare concrete and then peel over time.
The other idea is a 1-part urethane concrete sealer (after grinding the concrete well to open the pores) and then a 2-part aliphatic urethane as a top coat.
Basically the 2-part are better products because of durability, but straight epoxy only can get splotchy with spills. I used a 1-part epoxy paint in our bottling area, and a commercial floor wax, and it is holding up very well, but we don’t drive the forklift on it very often. I did a 2-part urethane sealer in the areas where the forklift spends a lot of time. That is working very well. The concrete grinding was a pain in the ass though. We had 70 year old floors that were stained from the decades of industrial use, and it seemed like we were grinding for months.
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We recently sealed our concrete floor ourselves by doing the following, first although we have a new floor concrete floor we washed the floor squeegeed to remove the dust etc. Rented a Clark machine from HD bought a series of high grit pads, re wet the floor and scarified the entire floor( 5000 sf )used both a vacuum and squeegee to remove all the water and cement residue, after a few days of drying time we applied a clear floor sealer aliphatic urethane by using garden sprayer and 12 inch low nap roller made for use with urethane.
It will be ok to walk on in 24 hours, we applied a second coat same process only rolling it in the opposite direction, we now have a clear mat finish that although will show scuff marks, should last at least 5 years and the best part it won’t peel off the floor , We Hope !
lorenzo
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We used a quartz surface that we installed. Epoxy, broadcast the quartz then seal with poly. We purchased commercial grade from a concrete supply (Carter Waters-nation wide) and installed ourselves.
We rented a grinder from Home Depot to prep the floor then the application was completed in a weekend.
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