Take Care of Deep Stains in Concrete without Grinding or Polishing
It's hard work to remove oil spots, mastic ghosting and other stains from concrete floors, often requiring grinding or acid washing. Sometimes, in spite of our best efforts, the blemishes remain. There are many out there that claim to have a solution, but results are often marginal.
Over the past months, our chemist has been developing and introducing a pigmented version of the Synergy Base. With a white pigment, the solids content of the Synergy Base is higher, but the penetrating characteristics are still fully in effect. There are a number of different ways that the pigmented Synergy Base can be used. It can be used to create white floors for those customers who would like to increase ambient light qualities in their work space. It can be tinted to achieve custom colors. Finally, and maybe most importantly, it can be used to cover up deep stains in the concrete such as ghosting from mastic, oil spots, paint stains, permanent marker stains, and pet spots to name a few.
The first week of November, 2010, we were in Arizona helping a new customer (All Stone Tile and Wood) apply the Synergy Concrete System to a condo floor. The floor had stains from paint, mastic and permanent marker. There was an extensive cleaning process that took place, as the goal was to avoid grinding the floor. The mastic from the previous floor (tile) was scraped off the surface, the nail holes were all filled and the floor was acid-washed. After acid washing, flooding and neutralizing the floor, the paint stains, permanent marker marks and ghosting were still very much in evidence.
Now that all of the prep work was done (which did not include any grinding or extensive sanding), it was time to start applying the Synergy Concrete System. We started with a coat of white pigmented Synergy Base that was tinted to be grey. You can see how the stains were mostly, if not completely covered up by the grey base coat.
After all of the stains and pConcreteLoches had been covered to the satisfaction of the applicator, the next step was to add some color to the floor. To add color, the applicators simply added an acid-soluble dye to some clear Synergy Base (not the pigmented Synergy Base). The first picture in the next series shows the floor with just the color coats added. As you can see, even though this is not an acid stain, there is beautiful mottling to the floor. This mottling and multicolor look was accomplished by first spraying a coat of Synergy Base with full-strength dye in it, and then following with two additional coats of Synergy Base of progressively lighter dilutions of the same dye. After the desired color was acheived, the ConcreteLoc was added. The rest of the pictures in this final series show the completed floor.
If you would like to learn more about the Synergy Concrete System, and why it is the best concrete protection on the market, please follow this link to our page about the Synergy Concrete System. If you have any questions for us about the Synergy Concrete System, check out our Synergy Concrete System FAQs or feel free to contact us.
