How to Prevent Road Salt Damage to Your Garage Floor

During the winter, salt can damage concrete garage flooring, and it’s a substance that’s difficult to avoid regardless of your driving and parking habits. In this post, Guardian Garage Floors NC discusses how road salt can damage your garage floor finishes and what you can do to prevent the damage.

 

Garage Floor

The Cause of Salt Damage to Your Garage Floor

When snow piles up and the roadways become treacherous with ice, road personnel apply road salt to keep the roads and highways safe. Even though road salt, also known as halite, has a composition similar to table salt, it’s naturally created and mined, which means it contains additional chemicals such as calcium chloride and liquid magnesium, which aid in the melting process and the prevention of ice refreezing.

Road salt tends to stick to tires and shoe soles, and it can be tracked onto your garage floor coating by your vehicle. On uncoated concrete floors, roads salt melts together with snow from the tires and generates a brine that’s absorbed by bare concrete rather than freezing on top as it would otherwise. As the brine is absorbed by the concrete, it becomes diluted and finally refreezes while still in the concrete, resulting in fissures, which is known as spalling. Subflorescence, or salt deposits embedded in the pores of the concrete, are caused by residual salt on the surface of the concrete.

Keeping Salt Damage at Bay

Salt on concrete can be removed by professionals or using cleaning chemicals that are designed specifically for the task at hand. Spalling, on the other hand, will require professional repair. The use of preventative measures will ultimately result in the use of fewer resources in the long run.

It’s best to invest in an epoxy garage floor that’s extremely long-lasting, waterproof and easy to maintain.  If your shoes or vehicles track road salt into your garage, all of the ensuing brine will simply remain on the coated surface, where it can be cleaned up at a later time with a clean cloth. In addition, the damage caused by road salt doesn’t occur overnight, so you’ll have time to ensure that the brine from the garage floor is cleaned up.

Guardian Garage Floors NC professionally installs quality polyaspartic floor coatings that are backed by a lifetime guarantee. Call us at (984) 205-9961 or fill out our contact form to schedule an appointment.