Scrapping Up Gooey Epoxy

Cleaning Up Gooey Epoxy on Your Floor:

    Scrapping up gooey epoxy on your floor is most efficiently done by pouring epoxy stripper onto the gooey floor and allowing it to sit for twenty minutes so that the epoxy can emulsify and then scrapping it up and off with long poles with sharp scrapping edges. This process requires large amounts of labor, stripper, and industrial strength trash bags to haul away the waste. 
   
    If your epoxy flooring project went bad, and the epoxy on your concrete floor did not cure correctly, and is still gooey after days then call HoustonFloorCoatings.com for emergency epoxy flooring disaster clean up services in Houston. The process requires strenuous manual labor, a large amount of epoxy stripper, personal safety equipment, and several hours to remove the gooey epoxy. This is not a process for home owners to attempt. 
   
    We scrape up epoxy floors in Houston that went bad. HoustonFloorCoatings.com

Concrete Surface Spalling (Scabs)

Houston Garage Floors was grinding a garage floor for an epoxy floor coating system for a customers brand new home that he had just built in Crosby Texas when the home owner pointed to the middle of the floor and said that he "had just noticed something" in the floor. The customer took a hammer and struck the concrete foundation which began to shatter like glass. The concreter was brittle at the surface and covering loose rocks in his foundation. Scabs are caused by excessive water puddling at the surface of the concrete slab during installation. The technical term for this occurance is concrete spalling or scaling. It is essentially powdery or sandy concrete that is deficient in nature and the result of excessive water at the surface (pour workmanship and material on the producers fault) and must result in a compromised home or anything else attached to it such as a floor coating. In order to remove the scabs you can strike the concrete firmly all over with a hammer and then use a screw driver to pry up the loose layers. Typically a 16 oz hammer will cause little to no damage to a garage floor even with heavy strikes but this foundation was so brittle that lightly moderate taps caused the floor to buckle. The section removed should be floated smooth with epoxy or an epoxy patch filler but naturally nothing you put on top can be guaranteed to stay just as you can not epoxy coat a sandy beach and expect the epoxy to not peel from the sand. Use personal safety equipment. This is why hiring an ethical and viable home builder is important. The evidence suggests that the concrete installers added too much water to stretch the material and working time. Multiple spark tests were performed and the concrete sparked which is a good indicator of quality concrete but like all tests the spark test is only a qualitative method of testing concrete for sufficiency and not quantitative. The nature of crumbling concrete is to continue to crumble. Therefore we repaired this floor with multiple coats over a 2 year period while we were not legally obligated to (per the brittle/defficient concrete clause in our contract) but because we were trying the show the love of Jesus to a gentleman who got burned by his builder. In 11 years to date (Jan 2014) I have never seen any garage floor do this so we switched to heavier screwdrivers (7oz) which can brake scabs during testing for sparks which gives us a quantitative measurement to theoretically see below the surface so that the customer can understand what they are bringing to the table better.

Moisture Vapor Emission in Concrete

HoustonFloorCoatings.com received a phone call from a home owner who said that the concrete slab in her home would get wet and leave behind salt deposits on the surface every time it rained outside.  After arriving to the home we discovered that the slab did indeed show signs of a rare occurrence called MVE, or Moisture Vapor Emission.  MVE is an occurrence which is caused by water attaching itself to salt molecules and being forced up and thru a concrete slab where it reaches the top and evaporates into the air leaving the salt deposits behind on the floors surface. Most homes have a moisture vapor barrier (a tarp) installed below the concrete slab which will prevent this occurrence, but this home owners vapor barrier was destroyed when plumbers dug below the slab and reinstalled the homes plumbing.  Since the pressure of MVE can be so great, it can cause tile or epoxy at the surface to buckle and peel. There are products that claim to block MVE to a certain amount of pressure, but the problem is that if the pressure is too great, these specialty coatings will also fail. The only way to be sure that a coating will perform under these conditions is to install a breathable water based coating such as Sherwin Williams Aqua Armor Epoxy, which will allow the moisture to pass thru the coating while filtering out the salt deposits.  Houston Floor Coatings prepared the home owners slab by diamond grinding and applied several coats of Aqua Armor Epoxy at a total of 20 dry mils in thickness.  After the coating was applied, the salt deposits did not return and the coating slowed down the moisture enough so that it evaporated immediately upon reaching the surface instead of puddling.