What is Epoxy?

Hey, this is Chris Idaho Painter. Thanks for watching this free lesson on how to epoxy a garage floor. If you want to see more of my comprehensive course, it's at paintlifeupply.com. It goes over estimating, it goes over marketing, it goes over all the steps to complete a professional garage epoxy floor. So, hopefully enjoy this lesson. Thank you for watching. Today, I got Tony Schwarz with me from Rustoleum and we're going to be talking about epoxy and epoxy floors. And I kind of use that, you know, term. Um, in general, I've been doing epoxy floors for over, I don't know, somewhere like 25 years. But technology has changed. There's a lot of new terminology out there. And we're going to kind of like try to break this down and share with our audience. So, it's not so confusing like it was when I was trying to research and try to figure out cuz when I was doing epoxy floors, there was no such thing as like one day floors. Now, we got floors you can actually do in one day in and out. One of the terms that we're all familiar with is epoxy. And what can you tell me what an epoxy is, Tony? Yeah, absolutely. Well, an epoxy is the resin utilized for historically most flooring applications. Recently, there's been a lot of new technologies that have come on the market over the last 20 years, but epoxy is still far and wide the number one utilized resin on the market. We have what we call like one day floors and I started doing some research and there was two terms that I um started seeing and reading about and kind of watching videos on and one of them is polyurea and another one is polyaspartic. Can you tell me what a polyurea is? Definitely. So similar to the epoxy that is the resin the polyora and so where epoxy historically has been used to build thickness for a coating for its excellent adhesion to its early moisture tolerance polyurea is going to give us a lot of uh flexibility to our system uh meaning those micro cracks aren't necessarily going to show through as much. It also has a little bit deeper of a bond to a concrete surface uh providing uh excellent wear and tear for the long term. So, a polyurea bonds better than an epoxy. Yes and no. Uh it's kind of a little bit of misleading. Uh well, I shouldn't say misleading, but uh there there's all debate. It's tough to actually accurately tell if it is or not bonding better simply because the pull-off test that's utilized to determine adhesion, whether that's an epoxy or a polyora technology, if the surface is prepared properly, they're both going to have concrete failure before the coating fails. And and so really the primary benefit of the polyurea is that flexibility. So the the coating is actually actually flexible. Correct. The coating is more flexible. And I guess the simplest way to describe it is if I touch an epoxy floor, it feels hard. It feels like a plastic. If I touch a polyurea floor, it's going to have slightly more of a rubbery type finish. All right. So that that definitely makes sense. So I've never heard that before. That's um good knowledge there. So the other term I hear is polyaspartic. What is a polyaspartic? Definitely. So polypartic is a resin. Again uh normally a term that you'll see with the polyespartic is alifhatic polyaspartic. Uh whereas epoxy and polyurea will discolor when exposed to forms of sunlight or different types of lighting. A polypartic is completely UV stable. And what really makes it great in these types of applications is that you get that UV stability. You can build it thick. It's more flexible than an epoxy. And so it functions really well in most flooring applications, especially garage and residential. So I think my understanding now I'm getting a really good understanding of these three terms. So a poly spartic, you know, when I think it's really common now to flake your floor. You throw flakes down, you know, on top of one of your coats and then you have to clear coat those flakes down and that clear coat, if you were using a polyurea, it would yellow over time. Is that true? Correct. If we were using a true polyurea for our clear coat, number one, it would probably pick up a lot of dirt because of that rubbery uh feeling to it. Uh and then number two is it would turn uh greenish yellow rather quickly. I've always done epoxy floors and they've always been, you know, colored. Is there clear epoxies? There are clear epoxies. So, if you put a clear epoxy over the top of your flakes, you would get some discoloration over time. Also, definitely a possibility. The uh epoxy resin is can also be uh tweaked a little bit. Uh so for instance the product we're using for our broadcast coat on this particular project is actually a cycle alifhatic epoxy resin meaning it will have the highest color stability available in an epoxy resin. Uh therefore if we use that as a clear we would get long durability out of it and a lot less noticeable discoloration than we would with say our traditional epoxies of the past. So nowadays, traditionally, your top coat is going to be a polyspartic because of the UV UV stability. So on a garage like this, um, if you're opening up your garage doors or if you got windows, that UV light's going to discolor the floor. It's going to yellow it over time. And so that's why you would use a polyphartic. Absolutely correct. The polyespartic is going to give you that long-term aesthetic appeal. Okay, that makes a whole lot of sense. So now with now that we've broken these three terms down, the floor that I do, I use uh we use a primer and then we use an epoxy and then we flake it and then we put a poly aspartic on top of that and you know that process is um you know a commonly used process. Is that different than a one-day floor? Yeah, that that is going to be different than a one-day floor. The the benefit of the system that we're going to be utilizing here with that three coats is we're going to save a lot of time by not having all the preparation surface preparation equipment. Um we're going to be able to apply that primer over a cleanly prepared surface allowing for that next coat to take place. Whereas a one-day floor, we're commonly going to need a significant investment in diamond grinding surface preparation equipment. And then we're going to have everything that goes with that. Uh, in terms of the silica dust, you know, you need the proper vacuums, you're going to need proper power to to power all your equipment. And so there's a lot of other moving parts that go into a one-day floor versus uh the floor we're doing here is consistent, repeatable with minimal investment uh, and minimal labor. Yeah, I think it's typically every floor that I've ever done, you know, it's a three-day process, and I've never had a floor fail. The system um I'm using here, it's actually Rustoleum products. So the first product um the process we're going to be cleaning the floor. After we clean it and it dries, we're going to use in Rustoleum's primer. What is that product we're actually priming with? So the primer that we're going to use on this product is uh in our Sealcrete label. It's called epoxy shell 550. And I for lack of better terminology, I call it a minimal surface prep primer. It's a water-based epoxy. Therefore, it's not going to disturb anyone with odors. uh not going to have an odor when you're applying it. And it really goes on like your traditional primer or paint. Working it out of a pan has incredible adhesion. We've used it from projects that should never have had something go over the top all the way to brand new concrete that was going to get a lot of durability that we thought no way it's going to last. And amazingly, it it's still there to this day. And and that's because Rustoleum at its core is a primer company. We're very good with primers. And that's where this technology came from. Yeah. So, I think this is one of the things I really like about this system. And historically, in the past, I used to come in, I would ac etch the floor. So, there's a lot of um things that could go wrong with acid etching. And you're actually using an acid. I would, you know, spray the acid on, I would flush it up to the, you know, the front of the floor, then flush it down, you know, outside. So, and trying to get like a really, you know, good etch on the floor. trying to get it like 100 grit sandpaper with this primer. You don't have to do any acid etching anymore, right? Correct. No acid etching. Uh could you acid etch? Absolutely. However, on this floor, there's a high likelihood that we have a sealer on here. Meaning that acid etching solution would actually do a good job cleaning the surface, but it actually wouldn't be etching the concrete uh because of the inorganic organic uh capabilities of those two working together. So, we've got our, you know, primer coat that we're going to be putting down. Then, we're going to be letting that dry. That dries 5 hours. And then we're going to be putting on an epoxy coat. And that we're going to be flaking over the top of that. So, that coat that we're going to be putting on, what is that product called? For the flake coat, we are going to be utilizing the epoxy shell 1000 EPL, which stands for extended pot life. Highlights of that particular product are uh the UV stability we get out of it. It's not UV stable, but it's the most UV resistant you can get. Like I mentioned earlier, 60 minutes of working time, and it self-level so much that we could literally just pour this out in ribbons on the floor and not touch it with a roller and just barely touch the piles together with the squeegee and it would flatten out. And so, we're going to roll that on. Then, we're going to flake it. Yep. And then, how long are we going to wait till we actually scrape the flakes? Uh, so for scraping the flakes, that's a great question. And that will depend a little bit on what temperatures we get. Looks like we're going to get good weather. So typically 12 to 16 hours we'd be ready to scrape this floor. And then we're going to come back and put a top coat of polyartic on. Right. That is correct. So that's the system we're going to be showing you here in this epoxy [Music]