Grouts are just like any other type of product on the open market. There is an endless variety of them. If you look hard enough, you’ll find that virtually every company has products they present as “grouts”. Of course, just like every other product, there is a wide range of what qualifies for “grout”. The properties only have to meet a minimum requirement to be “equal”. However, the actual results may be far from equal. 

The most important thing is that you have a way to choose the material that will exceed your requirements without breaking the bank or exceed your estimate when it comes to the installed cost. One good way to do that is to apply a consistent and basic series of questions and look for the materials that give you the right answers. Here are some questions that

There is a wide variety of material on the market designed to be applied to concrete floors to seal and protect. The best know are Epoxy Based and come in many grades. They can be poured to self-level, squeegeed, rolled, troweled or placed as a grout topping. While they are good for basic applications, epoxy-based products have very similar characteristics and have a very narrowly defined range of service. However, they tend to be resistant to the most commonly used industrial chemicals. But, they do fall short of the mark for two key characteristics: Resistance to Thermal Shockand Large Scale Seamless Installation.

So, what are the characteristics of Urethane Cements that make them so appealing? There are really 5 main points that make this versatile material a great choice for repair and protection. 

You’ve spent the money to get the right flooring for your production areas. It’s perfect. Now you have to maintain it’s like new condition to make sure it can do the job of protecting your concrete floors. 

The new surface will be subjected to impact, normal wear, dragging pallets, cleaning chemicals and high temperature water. These conditions will attack the new surface and will eventually compromise some part of it. It’s not what you want to happen, but it will. The key is to address the failures immediately. Any damage left un-repaired could get worse given the harshness of the service.

These areas can be a path to water getting under your flooring leading to bacteria growth that could cause the flooring to fail.

Take some simple steps to make sure you have a plan

Maintaining the overall health and integrity of your plant’s floor may not seem like a huge part of overall operations, but it is. Everything starts on the ground floor – from foot traffic, to forklift traffic. Small cracks lead to big cracks and big cracks could lead to having to replace an entire area of the floor which could cost production time and decreased efficiency.

It would be nice if your floor was one single huge concrete pad. The reality is that a floor is made up of 100s of slabs separated by joints. The purpose of these joints – to prevent random cracking in the concrete as it shrinks. Since raw materials and finished goods need to be transported, naturally, each individual joint is a transition point that forklifts and employees must cross.

Once the corner of a joint is damaged, spalling can