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Having any type of construction or remodeling in your home/business can be very stressful as there are a lot of factors to consider. Maybe you've done some research about different types of floor coatings to see what your options are and got bombarded with all these technical terms and price ranges.
Now you're Google and Facebook feeds are filled with advertisements from companies all claiming to have the greatest floor coatings in the world! And now you're ready to get quotes from specific companies.
1. What is the Solids Percentage of your product?
First, let's talk about what that even means. Regardless if you are getting epoxy, polyaspartic, acrylic, or whatever; there are always different levels of quality from brand to brand.
Solids refer to the amount of the actual chemical/product
Most manufacturers sell these products as low as 60% solids up to 100% solids. If a chemical is less than 100% solids then that means the remaining percentage is waste such as water or solvents used to "cut" the product to make it cheaper.
Now, why does that matter to you?
Plainly speaking, you deserve 100% of what you are paying for. There's a large number of businesses out there that buy concrete coatings that tout being "High Solids" and most customers don't know any better, but ask them what is the actual percentage.
From a legal standpoint to be called "High Solids," a chemical only needs to be 65%!
If the company won't answer that question or it's less than 100% your floor won't last.
Wilson's does not use any chemical that's less than 100% Solids.
-Our base coat, topcoat, and crack mender are all 100%
2. How Do You Prepare The Floor?
This may seem like a basic question, but the answer will differentiate the professionals from those who just watched a few Youtube videos.
There is a method to preparing a concrete floor for a coating that is much more common in the epoxy realm that is thankfully dying off. Acid Etching is the process of using hydrochloric acid to strip away the top layer of a concrete slab, which opens up the "pores" to allow water to penetrate the floor. Some concrete coating companies will use this method because it is less messy than the correct way to prepare the floor, which is by grinding with diamond tooling.
Acid Etching will permanently damage your floor and will cause the epoxy, or other coatings, to peel off or bubble excessively.
Any decent concrete coating company will use diamond tooling machines to profile your floor prior to applying any coatings.
These are either large machines that are pushed, similar to a lawn mower, or hand tools that grind off the topmost layer of the concrete.
3. Do You Offer Any Warranties?
To be blunt, getting a concrete floor coating is no small purchase. And even worse is hiring the wrong company and having to pay for the same floor twice!
Hiring the right company and expecting them to do the job right is, of course, priority #1. But getting a floor that is warrantied is just as important. Make sure you take time to go over a company's warranty before you pay for the installation and ask questions about any exemptions, limits, and timeframes that sound unclear.