Have you been wondering about the choices you have regarding your Wooden Floor Sanding and Polishing?  There is enough confusion today amid homeowners who are looking for the best garage floor epoxy for in their garage. Should they be looking at epoxy coating or epoxy paint?  Is there enough difference to even care? And if there is a difference, then which one is better? The most straightforward way of figuring this out is to understand the difference in epoxy paint, epoxy coating, and paint so that you can eliminate all the confusion and make an intelligent decision regarding your epoxy resin flooring.

Epoxy is not Equal to Paint

The first confusion that we need to address is that the best garage floor epoxy is not equivalent to paint. The paint applied to garage floors is actually a latex acrylic produce. A lot of well-known manufacturers of paint offer one that has a tiny bit of epoxy as part of the mix. This kind of mix provides better durability and adhesion compared to regular acrylic paint. This is still not an epoxy product.

What is an epoxy coating?

Epoxy is actually a product made from two components and consists of one part of polyamine hardener and one part of epoxy resin. You need to mix both of them together before the application. Once you mix them, you have the constraints of temperature and time which decide how long you can hold on before applying the mix. With epoxies that are coloured, the resin is tinted to give colour to the epoxy. If you choose to not to tint it, then it will be applied as a clear coating.

How the volume of solids makes a difference?

Epoxy’s thickness and easiness of application also depend on the amount of solids contained within. This will always be displayed as a percentage. Put another way, if you have 100% solids in the epoxy, it translates to having 100% of the product on the surface after it gets cured. Similarly, 50% of solids mean that there will be 50% product on the surface after it gets cured. The reason this happens is because of the carrier agents (solvents or water) that are used, as part of the product escapes through evaporation once the epoxy is cured.

What do DIY (Do it yourself) products contain?

The epoxy coating containing 100% epoxy is extremely hard to manage during the application process due to its thick viscosity and very limited time allowed for its application. Epoxy that has a lesser amount of solid content is less viscous and hence, it is easy to apply.

A lot of cheaper “DIY” epoxy paints that you can easily get at your local home improvement stores and even online carry a maximum of 48% solids. What this means is that the epoxy resin flooring that you end up with has lower solid content and hence, lower quality. Wooden floor sanding and polishing is adversely affected since the mixture goes inside the floor virtually like paint.