We Test Slabs Before We Price Industrial Flooring
We will not quote industrial flooring from a drawing. Square footage tells us what the job costs to cover and nothing at all about what is underneath, and in this city what is underneath is usually the deciding factor.
So the first visit is a survey. We look at the joints, the cracks, the drains, the dock aprons and the traffic pattern, and we take moisture readings inside the slab rather than off the top of it. If an old coating is down we grind a test patch to find out what it is and whether it is still bonded.
That survey is what makes an industrial flooring quote worth comparing. It is also occasionally what makes us tell a customer that the system they asked for is the wrong one, or that the slab needs replacing rather than resurfacing. That conversation is cheaper to have before the work than after it.
Halifax Buildings Give Industrial Flooring A Specific Set Of Problems
Working in one region for long enough means the same four industrial flooring problems turn up over and over, and all four of them are local.
The building stock is old. Burnside opened in December 1969 and most of it went up through the 1970s, before under slab vapour barriers were normal. Vacancy in Burnside sits near five percent with very little new construction, so tenants are refitting forty and fifty year old buildings rather than moving into new ones. That means damp slabs and legacy coatings on most sites we walk into.
The winter is wet rather than cold. Halifax crosses the freezing point most days through January and February instead of staying below it, and the humidity runs high all year, so drying is slow and freeze thaw cycling is constant.
The salt load is heavy. The municipality clears over four thousand lane kilometres of road and keeps up to twenty thousand tonnes of salt on hand, and a great deal of it arrives inside buildings on tires and boots.
The ground itself is reactive in places. Much of HRM sits on the slate of the Halifax Formation, parts of which carry enough sulphide that the municipality regulates it, and acidic groundwater is not kind to concrete.
Installing Industrial Flooring Around A Live Building
Almost no industrial flooring goes into an empty building, so phasing is normal rather than exceptional. We work section by section around racking and production, at night, on weekends and across planned shutdowns.
What we ask for in return is an honest window. The cure schedule of the industrial flooring you choose has to fit inside the time the building can give up, and it is far better to find that out while we are still choosing the system. Every quote carries two return to service numbers, one for foot traffic and one for wheeled traffic, because they are rarely the same day.
What Every Industrial Flooring Quote Names
Every industrial flooring quote names the system and its thickness, the surface preparation method and the profile we are preparing to, what happens at the joints and cracks, whether moisture testing and mitigation are included, the square footage and the return to service times.
If a quote you are holding from someone else does not name those things, it is not that it is a worse price. It is that it is not yet a comparable one.
