When choosing a concrete floor for your commercial location, it is always important to remember the environment that your floor will be presented with.
If the environment will be exposed to a lot of salt under foot traffic or especially large amounts of traffic, despite popular belief, polished concrete is not necessarily the best choice or even a good second choice.
While polished concrete floors are stronger and more abrasion resistant than epoxy coatings or other similar coatings or sealers, they do remain porous under a very thin layer of guard. This guard is used to prevent immediate staining on polished concrete but is certainly not a topping or permanent blockage to staining and salt penetration.
If your commercial concrete floor is an interior space that will not be exposed to contaminations such a salt and gasoline, polished concrete may very well be the better solution where abrasion resistance and impact resistance are the most important.
If you need your floor to be a good mix of both a coating and polished concrete, a middle ground can be found by using a floor coating with a more highly abrasion resistant topcoat such as an acrylic or polyurethane.
There are, again more options for commercial concrete flooring that can be discussed with an expert in the field. Some of these options may not even include coating or polishing but rather a chemical treatment of the floor to change its property to allow for a dust free abrasion resistant and impact resistant floor with no visual change to its sheen or colour.
Among all of the options available to you for commercial concrete floors, they can each be customized to match your needs even more closely. Such as, additional coats or self-levelling sand bases to increase the life and impact resistance even further.
Another thing to pay attention to is the common misconception that a non-slip floor needs to be an abrasive floor, or a floor with sand in it. This is not actually the case. There are many ways to put a top coat on a floor without having any type of texture that makes it hard to clean in order to achieve a higher slip resistance.
Some of these options include a non-slip wax or a topcoat of urethane. Not only do these finishes provide a lower slip factor to the floor, they also protect the underlying investment by creating a wear barrier that is less expensive to install and maintain.
The best way to know for sure what the best option is for your commercial space is to contact one of our commercial flooring experts and go over the exact use of a your space. Our experts will be able to inform you to make the right direction.
