Urethane Cement Flooring Solves The Thermal Shock Problem
Eighty degree wash water hitting a twenty degree slab is a violent event for a resin coating. Epoxy expands roughly three times as much as concrete does for a given temperature change, so the coating tries to move and the slab will not let it. The resulting shear lands on the bond line.
Run that twice a shift and it becomes hundreds of cycles a year. Delamination starts at the joints and the edges, where the film is least supported, and epoxy in genuine hot washdown service commonly fails inside twelve to twenty four months.
Urethane cement flooring does not have that problem because the movement mismatch is not there. Laid at nine millimetres it is rated for service between roughly minus forty and a hundred and twenty degrees and can be fully steam cleaned. At six millimetres the range narrows and steam cleaning becomes a light duty proposition, which is a detail most quotes leave out. The temperature rating is a function of the thickness, so a thickness has to be on the quote.
What Else Urethane Cement Flooring Does That Epoxy Cannot
Urethane cement flooring resists the organic acids that come with food production. Lactic, acetic, citric and hop acids attack standard epoxy resin over weeks and months of exposure, which rules epoxy out of dairy, brewing and meat processing regardless of how well it was installed.
It takes caustic clean in place solutions and quaternary sanitisers without breaking down, and it takes hot oil.
Urethane cement flooring can be laid on green or damp concrete with no standing water, which epoxy cannot, so a new slab does not have to sit for a month before the floor goes in. That does not mean moisture testing is skipped. It means the tolerance is wider.
The urethane cement flooring cove base is formed in the same pour, so the floor turns up the wall as one continuous piece with no joint at the bottom for bacteria to sit in. In a wash down room that detail is worth as much as the floor itself.
Slip resistance is built into urethane cement flooring rather than added to it. A standard heavy duty grade tests in the range normally specified for a wet food processing floor, without the heavy broadcast texture that makes a floor impossible to clean.
Why Urethane Cement Flooring Matters Particularly In Nova Scotia
This province lands over eight hundred million dollars of seafood a year and there are more than twenty licensed processing plants in Halifax County alone. Processing employment here roughly doubles between winter and summer, which is unusual and useful, because it means the quiet season for a fish plant is the winter and there is a genuine shutdown window when the building is not running flat out.
The airport has a purpose built cold chain facility for live lobster and fresh seafood, and there are breweries, distilleries and food distribution buildings scattered through Burnside and Bayers Lake. Every one of those is a candidate for urethane cement flooring, because the floors get wet, cold and cleaned hard.
