Polyaspartic
Polyaspartic Floor Coatings, Collingwood & Blue Mountains
One-day cure, installs down to about −20°C slab temperature, and it does not amber in sunlight. The default system for an unheated bay here.
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.
The three properties that matter on Georgian Bay
| Property | Polyaspartic | Standard epoxy |
|---|---|---|
| Install temperature | Cures well below freezing; slab temperature is rarely the blocker | Wants ~10°C and rising — rules out an unheated bay roughly Oct–May here |
| Return to service | Foot traffic same evening, vehicles in 24–48 h | Foot traffic 24 h, vehicles 5–7 days |
| UV stability | Stable — will not yellow in a doorway or a sunlit bay | Ambers. Visible first where the door light falls. |
| Flexibility | Tolerates slab movement through freeze-thaw | Harder and more brittle; less forgiving of a cycling slab |
| Cost | Roughly 20–35% more per square foot | Cheaper up front |
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. We install both. The recommendation follows the bay, 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.