ALL 100% SOLIDS EPOXIES ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL
As with most products in life there are similarities and also big differences in products that sound and look the same. Today there are lots of epoxy floor coatings proclaiming to be heavy duty, 100% solids or that high solids are good enough(no they’re not!). So what’s the difference and how can you tell which is the best product?? First be careful who you buy from. There’s a lot that can throw you off such as some companies advertise their epoxies as 100% solids when in fact they’re only 100% solids by weight and not volume which means they’re not truly 100% solids. See what we mean? When you purchase an ArmorGarage Epoxy System that is 100% solids it’s 100% solids by weight and volume in addition to being Military Grade 100% solids. Cyclioaliphatic epoxies tout being 100% solids but they are not military grade by any means. They’re a hybrid solids epoxy designed for cost savings. When doing an epoxy flooring project, saving a few dollars should not be your main criteria. It always costs you more money and heartache in the long run.
What are some of the other things to watch out for. Know that there is no such thing as lifetime epoxy coatings. Products advertised as such are just marketing gimmicks and you will never get lifetime warranty coverage on such epoxies. Also realize that warranties against Hot Tire Pick or peeling off is not the same as coverage from the epoxy wearing off! We offer a 5 year warranty against wear. Wear is the single most important factor you should be concerned with when buying an garage epoxy floor coating. The durability of the coating is what determines not only how long it will last but also how long it stays looking new. Most epoxy floors look great when first put down but soon start looking old and dirty when they’re not military grade. So when purchasing your garage epoxy flooring ask them what the guarantee on wear is. We get 100s of calls from customers who thought they were putting down heavy duty epoxy only to find out a lot sooner then they ever expected that the product they purchased was nowhere near heavy duty as claimed.
Beware of water based epoxies, these are all inferior and their claimed to fame is that they are environmentally friendly. That’s true but they don’t work well at all. First off they are up to 50% water so when you apply them 50% of the epoxy you bought evaporates into thin air leaving you with a paper thin coating. How can you tell if an epoxy is water based? It usually has a “WB” in the model number or part number. Also the pot life is usually in hours rather than minutes.
Water Based Epoxy Floor Coatings
Another thing to look out for is the final thickness of the finished product. ArmorGarage garage epoxies Armor Chip & Armor Granite are 20-30 mils thick versus some so called 100% solids and heavy duty epoxies that are 2-10 mils thick only. We can go on but hope you get the idea. If you haven’t done this before there’s a lot of things you don’t know about that will effect your satisfaction with the time and money you spent on doing your epoxy flooring project.
It may seem like a good idea when you read about it but doing it is much harder than it sounds. First off you need a tremendous amount of flakes, 70-75lbs of flakes for a typical 2 ½ car garage. Trying to do it with less chips and your floor will come out blotchy! Then you have the problem of applying so many flakes without them piling up in uneven lumps. If you’re not experienced in applying the color flakes they will end up in uneven layers and piles. Other companies trying to sell you on this will tell you that you can scrape the chips down. Again easier said than done and even after scraping and even sanding, the floor won’t look right.
Girvan P. wanted a two color floor with a border. This is how he did it. Once the floor is properly prepped by etch acid etching or grinding and or both. You apply the first base coat. In Girvan’s case he wanted a solid color so we went with our Armor II commercial system. So he did the whole floor in Light Gray and then when that dried the next day he taped off the rectangles and applied the Dark Gray epoxy inside the tape lines. He let that dry and he then taped off the border area and lightly sanded the epoxy floor border area inside the taped area. This was because the base coat had now been curing for more than 24 hours. Anytime an 
Once the floor is properly prepared (see how to 
So you’re ready to install garage epoxy flooring, but you’re not quite sure how to go about it. Don’t worry, you’re not alone! The first thing you need to do is make sure that you have the right materials, and that means buying a high quality epoxy flooring. Once you have it properly applied to your floor you will experience a number of different benefits. Most notably, your floor is going to look a lot better than it did as just bare concrete.
