Breaking tradition: an Intro to water based epoxy floor coatings

While this is a wood finishing blog I recently had to do a remodeling job for a new office and had a concrete floor to cover and make look good. Having been a supplier for the monopole line of water based concrete coatings  I decided to use my own products and make a training video out of the event.

The Product I’m using is a 2 component water based epoxy that will stick to anything and as well is inexpensive and USDA approved for food service areas. While I had shot blasted the floor to really clean it that was some what unnecessary with this product as it will adhere to any clean surface including porcelain tile.  That is good, really good if you need to put a coating down on a floor that you can’t shot  blast.

The down side to this product is that it has a 20-30 minute pot life, that means that you have that amount of time before it starts hardening up on you in the can, yup, that’s right 20-30 minutes. Mix this up and go to lunch and when you return you’ll have a door stop in your bucket. factually it won’t solidify that quickly but you will have wasted that material as it will be beyond use.

While the video, videography, production of this is about as good as terrible I’m posting it any way as there is a lot of instructional data that you should have if you are going to use this product.   My goal being to give you and my customers a fighting chance at getting it right the first time.

So once again please excuse the videography there are spots where the camera person zoomed in and left it out of focus. If you can over look these things I hope that you find the posting useful.

Further note on this product: epoxies are great primers and are very hard and this one is one of the best, that being said, epoxies will “chalk” up in the sun light so you don’t what to have and epoxy in the direct Sun light, if you need to use and epoxy primer to get your top coat to stick then top coat the epoxy with another product, in the industry urethanes are generally used over the epoxies heavy equipment painting, tractors  oil rigs, farm equipment and things of that nature are generally primed with and epoxy and then top coated with a polyurethane. the polyurethane is UV stable and will not fade in the sun light and the epoxy is the hard tough protective coating. The “Chalking” doesn’t effect the integrity of the coating just the look. So this application is in side a garage and will have little to no sunlight.

The real trick with this product is getting it mixed and applied quickly. For my application we also applied a color sprinkle to give the floor a little depth and quality. so for this we would coat a section of the floor and then sprinkle in the colored flakes and then move on to do another section.

In the next video we applied the top coat of permashield 2000 and that is another fast dry product that cures very fast.

You are welcome to contact me with questions on this product and others.

In the next video we’ll do the top coat.

Best,

Greg Saunders
Annex Paint