How Long Do Polyaspartic Floors Last In Your Garage?

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How Long Do Polyaspartic Garage Floors Last After Installation?

Polyaspartic garage floors are a great investment for your home. People often wonder 'is Polyaspartic flooring expensive'?  That depends on the thickness of the flooring you are getting. The following are three of the most important factors to consider when it comes to their life, and cost.

• The type of coating used – There are two main types of floor coatings, epoxy floors and polyaspartic floors. Polyaspartic floors are more durable and last longer than epoxy. If you want your garage floor to last longer, use a higher quality product like polyaspartic urethane because it lasts 2-3x longer than epoxy. The reason polyaspartic lasts longer than epoxy is because it is more resilient. Resiliency is the ablity of a material to flex and return to its normal position without damage. Your car tires are more relinient than the rims they are attached to which makes them last longer than metal tires. If your tires were made of metal then they would wear down very quickly because metal has no ability to absorb stress and return to its normal shape. When metal hits a bump it is damaged forever. Epoxy is not relient, it is rigid which means when you drop something on epoxy it will chip while polyaspartic can flex and return to its normal state without permament damage. This is why polyaspartic has a longer wear life. This is also why they don't crack and buckle over concrete cracks like epoxy does. All concrete cracks move when the temperature changes which causes stress on the floor coating that is bridging over the cracks. This is why epoxy is prone to cracking, chipping and buckling. Epoxy might be a cheaper alternative but there are reasons it is cheaper. You truly get what you pay for.

• The quality of the installation – The quality of the installation is also important. If the installation is not done properly, the coating will not last as long as it should. Make sure to hire a company who knows how to properly prepare concrete and who also knows what materials to use to fill cracks with before installing an epoxy or polyaspart garage floor. Preparation is key.

If you have ever wondered, “how thick is Polyaspartic flooring?” the answer is going to be relative to the number of gallons that are put down. Most floors are about 4 to 35 mils thick. The thinner the floor, the faster it will wear away, so whenever you are getting a floor coating installed you should always ask "How thick is the flooring going to be after it dries?" Since thinners like acetone are used to help the coating level out smoother you should remove the acetone from the equation because it will evaporate and not be there after the floor dries. If you take 1 gallon of coating and spread it out on a perfectly smooth surface until the coating is 1 mil thick then the gallon will have covered 1,604 square feet. Keep in mind this is the wet mil thickness, we will consider shrinkage later to determine the dry mil thickness. So if you want to get a floor that is thinner than 1 mil then you stretch out the coating so that it covers more than 1,604 square feet. For example, if you wanted a floor coating to be half a mil thick then you would cover 1,604 x 2 = and get 3,208 square feet. Therefore if you stretch out an entire gallon of coating over 3,208 square feet then the floor should be half a mil thick every single time. This is assuming the floor is not rough and is perfectly smooth, but that it not usually the case, most surfaces are rough and are not level therefore it will puddle in some areas and be thinner in others, this is why spread rates are always theoretical. In theory the floor is half a mil thick but its actually 1 or 2 mils in some spots and a quarter of a mil or less in other spots. This is why you can't measure the thickness of a floor in one spot and assume its all the same thickness. What you want to know is how many gallons were put down. If we want a floor that is 10 mils thick then we divide 1,604 by 10 and get 160.4 square feet. If you cover 160.4 square feet with a coating it will be 10 wet mils thick. I say wet mils because coatings shrink a little or a lot depending upon the solids content. If a coating is 70% solids then 30% of it will evaporate thus turning a 10 wet mil floor into a 7 dry mil floor after it dries. If you have a 70% solids coating and you want it to be 10 mils thick after it dries you just put the floor coating down 3 mils thicker which means you would put it down at about 14.2 wet mils and it would dry to 10 mils thick. The dry mils thickness is what matters. 100% solids materials are not better than materials that have a lower solids content, they are just more concentrated and cheaper the buyer because they have less acetone or other types of solvent that are less expensive than the actual product. All coating end up dry. There are many benefits to using products with a lower solids content and there are many benefits to adding solvents like acetone or xylene to 100% solids coatings. Adding solvents to a coating lowers the viscocity of the material so that it levels out smoother and it gives you more time to work with the material so that you can pay attention to the details and it helps level it out. Adding solvent does not make the floor thinner, it simply adds time and lowers the viscocity so that you can get a better looking floor. Unfortunately solvents cost a lot of money (especially the good ones that a very slow drying) and a lot of companies don't like spending money, so they try to confuse people by saying stuff like "100% solids material is better." This doesn't make any sense and is just a sales pitch to justify not taking the time to  add solvent that would help reduce the coatings viscocity (make it thinner) so that it can penetrate deeper. Therefore the term thinner is referring to lower viscocity and not thickness.

At Houston Garage Floors, we recommend polyaspartic urethane coatings vs epoxy. Polyaspartic dries fast enough so that you can drive on the floor in 12 hours but this doesn't effect the adhesion strengh because we use expenive thinners to slow down the drying for the first hour so that the coating can be leveled smooth and so that it has enough time to penetrate and latch onto the concrete like a vise. Polyaspartic is 100% UV stable which means it will not brake down when exposed to the sun. Epoxy will yellow and lose strength when exposed to any type of light (even if you cover it with a clear coat of urethane.) Light has no problem going thru clear urethane and damaging the epoxy below. Polyaspartic urethane sticks to concete much better than epoxy, and it is much stronger. Polyaspartic is also resilient which means it will not crack and buckle like epoxy does when put over moving cracks. This is very very important because concrete can develop cracks years after it was installed and all cracks move so you want o something over the crack that acts like a flexible bridge unlike a brittle epoxy bridge.  Contact us today for more information 281-849-3070