Winterizing Garage Floors

Win Clients by Preventing the Harsh Effects of Road Salt

2018-01-07

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." -Benjamin Franklin

With the holiday season newly behind us, the harsh reality of winter—and specifically, driving in it—is starting to settle in. If you're in a part of the country like our Midwest headquarters, you may have experienced the same plummeting temperatures last week, taking us from seeming balmy 40°s to shocking below-0° cold.

With winter and snow comes roads covered in salt and de-icers. These chemicals make it safe to drive, but come with a cost: they attach to the undercarriage of our cars, only to be deposited on garage floors at work and at home.

Your customers, residential and commercial alike, experience the same thing. Are their garage floors protected from winter's chemicals?

Like Ben Franklin's famous words - you can wait with your customers until spring's revealing of winter's effects, or reach out to them now about coating their concrete floors to prevent further damage.

The key to approaching clients about coating their garage floors lies in informing them of the harsh effects of salt and de-icers on concrete garage floors.

Back in the garage, these de-icers create a liquid solution that seeps into bare concrete. Once this brine is diluted by enough melting snow and ice, or when temperatures drop extremely low, it refreezes inside concrete pores, expanding and slowly breaking it apart. This cycle can happen repeatedly over a single season, resulting in broken concrete known as spalling.

Even if road de-icers are not used in your customer's town, water that works its way into more porous garage floors can still freeze overnight and slowly cause the same kind of damage.

Another side effect of winter's road salt is subflorescence: when the moisture in your garage floor finally evaporates, the salt left behind recrystallizes in concrete's pores. This causes spalling as well, and leaves behind those ugly white stains.

Next week we'll get into how to restore a concrete floor ravaged by road salt and winter, and the following week weigh in on different options for protecting garage floors available on the market.

In the meantime, however, why let your customers wait for springtime to reveal spalling damage caused by winter chemicals? You can help protect their floors - and we can help you do it. Click here to schedule a chat to learn more about the most long-lasting, environmentally-green salt-resistant concrete coating solutions.