Base Coat Debate

Polyurea as a Base Coat: Marketing Hype or Practical Choice for Garage Flooring. Polyurea and epoxy are commonly advertised as base coats for concrete surfaces, but is polyurea as a base coat all it’s cracked up to be, or is it just a marketing gimmick for your epoxy garage floor coating in Toronto, Mississauga, Vaughan, the GTA, Scarborough, and Brampton? While polyurea is often marketed for its superior strength, this isn’t always the most crucial factor, especially in garage applications where other properties take precedence for your residential epoxy flooring.

Key Properties

When selecting a base coat, two key properties are paramount: adhesion to the substrate, which is essential to prevent delamination and ensure the coating’s longevity—epoxy typically offers superior adhesion to concrete compared to polyurea with concrete coating services—and moisture vapor barrier (MVB) properties, as a good base coat should protect the concrete from moisture damage, an area where epoxy can provide MVB protection while polyurea generally cannot.

Practical Choice

While polyurea is undeniably strong, its strength as a base coat is largely irrelevant in many applications since the topcoat, often a polyaspartic coating, is designed to withstand impact, abrasion, and chemical spills for your garage floor coating across the GTA. We’ll delve deeper into the benefits of polyaspartic coatings in a future discussion, but for now, given that epoxy is typically not as expensive as polyurea, it simply makes sense to choose epoxy for your base coat and not fall for marketing gimmicks that might cost you more with epoxy flooring Toronto. Avoid unnecessary expenses—choose our proven coating systems for your garage floor!