Nova Scotia Sets The Aisle Widths For Warehouse Line Painting
The Occupational Safety General Regulations are specific about lift truck aisles. A one way aisle has to be at least as wide as the wider of the vehicle or the load it carries, plus six hundred millimetres. A two way aisle has to be at least twice that width, plus nine hundred millimetres.
Very little else about floor marking is actually written into law. Red for fire equipment and danger and yellow for aisles and traffic lanes are the two conventions with weight behind them. The blues, the greens, the orange for material awaiting inspection and the black and white keep clear hatching are all convention that your own safety program adopts. They are useful and we mark them every week, but they are your standard rather than a legal requirement.
That matters because it changes what you should be asking for. No warehouse line painting layout can be signed off as compliant by the contractor who installs it, and anyone offering you that is describing something that does not exist. What you can ask for is a layout drawn to your program, set out to the regulated aisle widths, and installed in a material that still says the same thing in three years.
The Material Decides How Long Warehouse Line Painting Survives
Ordinary traffic paint is the cheapest warehouse line painting available and it will give you six to twelve months in a busy aisle. It has a place for temporary layouts and trial runs and almost no place in a permanent one.
Epoxy line paint over a mechanically abraded stripe is the warehouse line painting standard. With the line path ground or blasted before painting rather than just swept, it will hold five to seven years. Polyurethane and polyaspartic sit above it and cure faster, which is what you want at dock doors where sunlight is a factor.
Floor tape is not warehouse line painting and belongs in offices and light duty areas. Under a forklift steer wheel it shreds, and it shreds first at exactly the places the marking matters most, which are the turn in points at the ends of racking.
Warehouse Line Painting Fails Where The Trucks Turn
A solid tyred forklift does not just press on the floor, it scuffs sideways when it turns on the spot. That torsional load is what tears warehouse line painting off the slab, so wear concentrates at intersections, at rack end turn ins and on the dock approach rather than evenly along a run.
Knowing that changes how warehouse line painting should be scoped. Repainting the turn zones annually and doing a full remark every few years costs a fraction of remarking the whole building every time, and it keeps the layout legible continuously instead of in cycles. Catching a line before it fades rather than after cuts what the restriping costs considerably.
Preparation matters in warehouse line painting as much as it does on a full floor. We abrade the stripe footprint rather than the whole slab, and on an oily floor the line path is degreased first, because line marking that lifts has almost always lifted from a contaminant rather than worn away.
