CONCRETE STAIN OR EPOXY for Garage Floors? Best product for concrete floors.

This is Chris, the Idaho painter. I'm still up here at my cabin in Tamarack doing some snowboarding, but I wanted to answer some of my questions to my YouTube subscribers. And one of them is whether they whether you should use a stain or an epoxy. And there's just there's a couple differences between the two of them. And quickly, a stain is designed on new concrete. It'll absorb into the concrete and it's going to still keep that profile of concrete. So, the concrete's still going to be rough. An epoxy is going to create a top coat on the the epoxy, a real thick film, and the the the concrete floors is going to have a nice smooth finish. So, one you could mop out and clean out really easily. The other one's still going to be a lot like your concrete except it's going to be stained. And it comes in opaque stains and semi-transparent stains. Your epoxies are just solid color and you just pick any color you want and apply that color. And you know some of the differences between a stain and epoxy. An epoxy is typically more a lot more resistant to chemicals than a stain is. So when you're driving in uh in your your garage, if you're using it in a garage, there's a lot of chemicals in your garage, including your brake fluid, which is a very harsh chemical on floors. So, if your if your um automobile is leaking brake fluid or you got oils, uh antifreeze, some of your other cleaners and stuff like that in the garage, an epoxy is going to be a lot more resistant and not get damaged or discolored from those chemicals. So, if if you got a lot of stuff that could possibly get on the floor, uh you definitely want to put an epoxy on. What's easier to apply? uh they both they both really need to go through a nice good cleaning and etching process before you apply them. But an epoxy you don't have to uh our our epoxies we apply they're two parts. You put them together, you sweat them and they got to go through the sweat process and the application process is definitely a lot harder, a lot more time consuming, especially because you got to do multiple coats and you got to wait for dry times, cure times and all that. Uh a stain is very simple to do. any do-it-yourselfer can do it. You just get your concrete etched really good, cleaned really good, and you just roll it on. And it's typically going to take two coats. The epoxy is very, very critical that you apply it properly. Otherwise, if you uh don't apply it properly and you drive in and you're you for for instance get hot tire pickup and it peels off, then you really got a spot now on your epoxy that's gone. And epoxy you how do you actually touch it up cuz you got to sweat, you know, two gallons together. And so it's almost impossible to touch up. You'd have to buy two kits. It'll cost you a couple hundred dollar just to do a little touchup. Now, uh, stain, if you get little spots here or there that, uh, peel up or whatever, they're very easy to stain. You just have a little bit bit of extra or go down, buy another gallon, and just roll a little bit on that spot. So, very convenient for touch-ups and uh, with a stain. And some of those are a couple of the differences between the two of them. We typically I stains are really good for say uh a laundry room that doesn't have any flooring in it. Actually in my house, my laundry room is a concrete floor and I just stained it with a solid color stain. I don't want to go to the whole expense of using an epoxy in my laundry room floor versus a stain. Stain just roll it on. Easy to apply. So th those are some of the difference between the two. Outside epoxies have to be applied indoors. So, if you want your color on your concrete outdoors, you've got to use a stain. And we typically use a stain from Sure Whims called HNC uh stain. And we're we don't hardly ever use a semi-transparent stain. We use solid color stains. But hopefully that answers some of, you know, when you would use a stain and why you would use a stain and what's more convenient and more easy to use. A stain is way easier to use than epoxy. If you're a do-it-yourselfer, don't have a lot of experience with epoxy, uh you could have a lot of things go wrong.