How Polished Concrete Flooring Is Ground And Refined
Polished concrete flooring runs in two phases through a fixed sequence of diamond grits, and each pass has to fully remove the scratch pattern left by the one before it.
The cutting phase uses metal bonded diamonds, starting around thirty to fifty grit to flatten the slab, remove old coatings and expose as much aggregate as the finish calls for, then refining through a hundred and two hundred.
A penetrating silicate densifier goes on between the last metal bond pass and the first resin bond pass. It reacts with the free lime in the concrete to fill the capillary pores and harden the surface so it will take and hold a polish. Skipping it, or applying it at the wrong point in the sequence, is why some polished floors never come up properly.
The refining phase then runs resin bonded diamonds through four hundred, eight hundred, fifteen hundred and, for a full gloss, three thousand grit. Where the sequence stops decides the finish, from a matte salt and pepper look through honed and satin to a mirror.
A grit skipped to save a day is the usual reason for hazy, patchy polished concrete flooring, and it cannot be corrected without going back down the sequence and starting again.
What Polished Concrete Flooring Will Not Do
It gives you no chemical resistance at all. Polished concrete flooring is still concrete, so acids etch it and oils stain it. In a plating room, a battery charging bay or a food production area it is the wrong specification and we will tell you so.
Polished concrete flooring highlights defects rather than hiding them. Grinding makes existing cracks, old patches, adhesive shadows and colour variation across the slab more visible, not less. Any crack that is still moving will re-open through the finish.
Polished concrete flooring cannot level a slab. Grinding follows the surface it is given, so it reveals the high and low spots rather than correcting them.
It is hard, cold and reflective of sound, which matters where people stand in one place all day, and it needs attention at entrances where water gets tracked in.
Where Polished Concrete Flooring Is The Right Answer In HRM
Dry warehousing and distribution is where polished concrete flooring earns its keep. The maintenance model is different from a coated floor, because it is dust mopped and periodically burnished rather than recoated, so there is no shutdown every few years to reinstall a surface.
Densifying the slab also stops it dusting, which is a genuine operating problem in a racked building where concrete dust ends up on product and in the air filters of every piece of powered equipment.
The light reflectivity is worth real money in a tall bay building, and despite looking glossy a dry polished floor is not inherently slippery. For facility entrances, showrooms and the office space attached to a plant it also simply looks better than anything else at the price.
