Walk through enough Sydney warehouses and you start to notice a pattern. Some floors are pristine — smooth, bright, easy to clean, and clearly built to take punishment. Others are bare concrete: dusty, stained, chipped at the joints, and a nightmare to maintain. The difference, more often than not, is a quality epoxy coating applied at the right time.
But here’s the thing. Epoxy isn’t always the right answer. It does certain things brilliantly and others not at all. Before you commit to a coating job — which on a large floor represents real money — there are five questions worth sitting with. Getting them right upfront saves you from discovering the problems six months after install.
1. What kind of traffic is your floor actually taking?
This one matters more than most people realise when they first start looking at floor coatings.
Standard epoxy systems are tough, but “tough” covers a wide range. A food-grade distribution centre running electric pallet jacks is a very different environment to a heavy manufacturing site with steel-wheeled trolleys and forklifts turning on the spot all day. The latter generates a type of abrasion and impact stress that will eventually wear through a coating that isn’t specified for it.
Think about what actually moves across your floor. Is it pedestrians only? Pneumatic or solid rubber-tyred equipment? Are there point loads from racking systems? Chemical spills? Steam cleaning? Each of these places different demands on a coating, and the epoxy system — the primer, build coats, and topcoat — needs to be specified accordingly. A reputable contractor should be asking you these questions before they quote. If they’re not, that’s worth noting.
1. Evaluating Experience with Similar Commercial Assets
Commercial buildings are not interchangeable. The maintenance and remedial requirements of a high-rise office tower in the Sydney CBD are fundamentally different from those of an industrial warehouse in Western Sydney or a retail complex on the New South Wales Central Coast. Each asset class carries its own structural characteristics, tenancy obligations, safety protocols, and regulatory considerations.
When assessing a contractor’s suitability, review their portfolio with your specific asset class in mind. An experienced commercial building services provider working in the office sector will understand the heightened expectations around facade presentation, the sensitivity of tenants to noise and disruption, and the critical importance of maintaining lifts, fire systems, and common areas throughout any works. A contractor specialising in industrial assets will be well-versed in the structural demands of heavy floor loads, large-span roof systems, and the remediation of industrial concrete slabs.
Asking for documented case studies, site references, and evidence of completed projects within your asset class is entirely reasonable and strongly advisable. A reputable provider will welcome the scrutiny.
2. What condition is the concrete substrate in?
Epoxy doesn’t fix bad concrete. It goes on top of it. And if the concrete underneath is weak, contaminated with oil, or has active moisture coming through from below, the coating will fail — usually by delaminating in patches, which is both ugly and a trip hazard.
Before any coating work, the concrete needs to be assessed properly. This means checking compressive strength, looking for surface contamination, and doing a moisture test. In older Sydney facilities, especially those built in the 1970s and 80s, you’ll often find concrete that’s absorbed years of oil and hydraulic fluid into its pores. That contamination needs to be mechanically removed — typically through shot blasting or diamond grinding — before anything else happens.
If a contractor turns up, walks the floor for two minutes, and hands you a quote without any substrate testing, push back. The preparation phase is where coating jobs succeed or fail.
3. Do you need a slip-resistant finish?
This is often the question that gets skipped until someone raises a WHS concern or, worse, until there’s an incident.
Polished epoxy can be slippery when wet. In a dry warehouse where spills are rare, that might be fine. In a commercial kitchen, a food processing area, a wash-down zone, or anywhere near loading dock doors where rain gets in, it’s a problem. Under Australian Standard AS 4586, different areas have different minimum slip-resistance requirements — and the standard specifies both wet and dry ratings depending on the use.
The good news is that slip resistance can be built into an epoxy coating through aggregate additions to the topcoat. The less good news is that it changes the texture of the floor, which affects cleanability. These are trade-offs your coating contractor should walk you through, not decisions you should be making in the dark.
4. How much downtime can you actually absorb?
Here’s where a lot of facilities managers get caught out. A quality epoxy floor system isn’t a one-day job. The process typically involves concrete preparation (grinding or blasting), a primer coat, one or two build coats, and a topcoat. Each coat needs to cure before the next goes down. In cooler conditions — which in a Sydney winter isn’t unusual overnight — cure times extend.
For a medium-sized warehouse floor, you’re commonly looking at three to five days out of action. For very large floors, the work can be staged in sections to keep parts of the facility operational, but this adds cost and coordination. Work out what downtime actually costs your operation per day, then factor that into how you evaluate quotes. The cheapest installer on paper can end up the most expensive option once lost productivity is counted.
5. What outcome do you actually need from this floor?
This sounds like a simple question, but it’s worth being specific. Are you coating because bare concrete is causing dust issues? Because the floor looks unprofessional when clients visit? Because you need chemical resistance? Because you’re trying to meet food-safety requirements? Because you’ve got a safety audit coming up?
The reason matters because different outcomes point toward different systems. A warehouse that needs dust suppression and better light reflectance has different requirements to a commercial kitchen that needs a food-grade, seamless, slip-resistant surface with coved skirting. Getting clear on your primary objective — and communicating it clearly to your contractor — is the fastest way to make sure you end up with a floor that actually does what you need it to do.
When Epoxy Isn’t the Right Choice
It’s worth being direct about this. If your concrete has significant structural damage — deep cracking, slab settlement, active deterioration — coating over it isn’t a solution. The underlying problem will express itself through the coating eventually, and you’ll have paid for a finish that masks rather than resolves the issue.
Similarly, if moisture vapour transmission from the slab is too high, even good moisture-tolerant epoxy systems will struggle. In those cases, the moisture issue needs to be addressed first, which is a separate scope of work.
A decent floor coating contractor will tell you this upfront. If yours doesn’t, ask directly: is the concrete in a condition where a coating will last?
At Stakat Building, we’ve been applying epoxy and polyurethane floor coatings to warehouses, industrial facilities, and commercial spaces across Sydney for years. We do the substrate assessment before we quote, and we’ll tell you honestly if we think the floor needs other work done first.
If you’d like a site assessment, give us a call or send us a message through our contact page. We’ll come out, have a look, and give you a straight answer.