Concrete Polishing Company | The Floor Company - Part 3
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Polished Concrete Floors for Commercial Locations

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Greg Bell in Concrete with Comments Disabled

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.polished concrete company ottawa

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.

 

How To Choose The Right Concrete Polishing Company

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Greg Bell in Concrete with Comments Disabled

how to choose the right concrete polishing company Due to the increased interest in polished concrete and other modern industrial finishes, there is a lot of misunderstanding and miseducation about what polished concrete is and how it is installed.

A good concrete polishing company will have an in-depth understanding of how the process works but more importantly, which concrete slabs will make a good candidate for the outcome desired by the customer.

Not all concrete slabs are the same. Variances in aggregate size, softness of concrete, levelness of concrete placement technique, and cure method will yield a different slab every time.

An experienced and knowledgeable concrete company has the tools required to test a slab prior to recommending polished concrete rather than another method to achieve a similar result. Once the company determines that your slab is a candidate for polished concrete, there are many options that need to be chosen prior to providing a quote and commencing the work.

Make sure the company that you hire can answer the following questions during the quoting process: will the process be dust free or with minimal dust, what grit will you finish the floor at, will the floor be hardened and at what point, once the polish is complete, will the surface be guarded and then burnished, how long will the project take, what are my sheen options, what are my colour options?

It’s important to understand that unfortunately in the industry, polished concrete is  a term often assigned to an incorrect process of polishing concrete or sometimes, it is used as a term to describe a finish that isn’t even being polished.

For example; pay attention to whether the concrete polishing company is selling you a process where they would simply be grinding the floor and then sealing it. Even through this would yield a potentially shiny floor with exposed aggregate; this is not a polished slab.

In some cases, a company will quote you for polished concrete and when installing the system, they may skip steps at the beginning and end of the process. This will lower their time, labour costs and machine tooling expenses. The floor may look as desired or close enough when finished, however the longevity of a floor finished with skipped steps is drastically reduced.

As a rule of thumb, remember that a polished concrete company should be going through at least 9 steps to achieve a polished concrete floor including the hardening, guarding and burnishing steps.

Contact one of our professionals today for an on-site evaluation of your current concrete slab. If you are building in the future, we would be happy to assist you in coordinating the pour of your new concrete slabs to help ensure the outcome required for polished concrete.