Polyaspartic
Polyaspartic Floor Coatings, Collingwood & Blue Mountains
Fast return to service, no ambering in a sunlit bay, and a minimum slab temperature we quote off the data sheet rather than off the category.
Polyaspartic is a polyurea. It arrived as an industrial coating for bridge decks and steel exposed to weather, which tells you most of what you need to know about why it suits this region.
What the data sheets say, side by side
| Property | Polyaspartic | Standard epoxy |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum slab temperature to install | Varies by product, not by chemistry. Onyx 87 wants 10°C, Citadel POLY100-SC 13°C, Elite Crete MXP 21°C. Low-temp lines reach about −1°C. | Also varies. Sikafloor-264 substrate min 3°C. Rust-Oleum 9100 rated 0–35°C, Winter Grade 0–15°C. Sikafloor-315 wants 10°C. |
| Cold once cured | Not a limit. A cured floor takes a Georgian Bay winter; most sheets publish no lower service temperature at all. | Same. The install window is a process constraint, not a service one. |
| Return to service | Foot traffic ~24 h, vehicles 3–7 days per the sheets | Foot traffic 24 h, vehicles 5–7 days |
| UV stability | Stable — will not yellow in a doorway or a sunlit bay | Aromatic epoxies amber. Visible first where the door light falls. |
| Flexibility | Tolerates slab movement through freeze-thaw | Harder and more brittle; less forgiving of a cycling slab |
| Working time | Short pot life. No margin for a slow crew. | Longer pot life. Forgiving of a mistake. |
| Cost | Roughly 20–35% more per square foot | Cheaper up front |
Read that first row again, because it is the opposite of the sales pitch
Every one of those figures comes off a manufacturer data sheet. Put together they say something the industry does not: on cold-weather application there is no clean winner between the two chemistries. The coldest-rated product in that list is an epoxy. The warmest is a polyaspartic. A company that tells you "we use polyaspartic so we can work all winter" has told you nothing checkable, and may have told you something false about the pail in their van.
One thing those figures are not: a limit on the finished floor. They are application temperatures, and they govern only whether the coating cures properly on the day. A floor laid in July is fully cured by August and takes a −20°C garage in January without trouble — most data sheets do not publish a lower service temperature at all. If your schedule allows a summer booking, the whole question goes away and you choose on cost and appearance instead.
There is a further catch that applies to both. Every sheet also carries a dew point rule — typically the substrate must sit at least 3°C above the dew point — and a humidity ceiling, usually 85%. On a damp shoulder-season day beside Georgian Bay the dew point stops a job that the thermometer would have allowed. That is the reading most crews never take.
The honest catch
Polyaspartic has a short pot life. Once it is mixed the clock is running hard, and in warm weather a crew can lose a batch by being slow with it. That means it is unforgiving of an inexperienced installer in a way epoxy is not — epoxy gives you time to fix a mistake and polyaspartic does not. It is a reason to care who installs it, and a reason the price sits above epoxy: the labour has to be right the first time.
It also will not save a bad slab. If there is moisture coming up through the concrete, polyaspartic delaminates the same as anything else. The moisture test is not optional on either product.
When we will tell you to use epoxy instead
A heated shop or a finished basement with a stable slab temperature and no direct sunlight is a good epoxy candidate, and you will pay less for it. A thick self-levelling epoxy also builds far more film in one pass, which is what you want if the floor is genuinely rough and you are trying to flatten it rather than follow it. And a cold unheated bay in late autumn is sometimes an epoxy job too, because a winter-grade epoxy rated to 0°C beats a polyaspartic rated to 13°C on that day. We install both. The recommendation follows the slab reading, not the invoice.
Talk to a Collingwood floor coating contractor
Tell us the size of the bay, roughly when the slab was poured, and whether the building is heated. That is usually enough for a realistic range over the phone — and enough for us to say if you are in the small group of floors where the honest answer is to fix the water before spending anything on a coating.