Residential Polished Concrete Flooring For Your Homes: Here Is What To Know

Residential polished concrete flooring is becoming popular these days. So why do people prefer to have polished concrete floors these days? Are there any advantages of having to go with polished concrete over other floor types such as wooden floors, mosaic or tiles floors?

Let’s find out

Defining what is polished concrete

Polished concrete floors are shinier and smoother. By polishing the concrete surface, the concrete creates a lustrous glow. There is a complex mechanical procedure for obtaining polished concrete floors, and for this, we recommend that you choose experts. For polishing, a penetrant chemical is used. Residential polished concrete flooring also has different styles and textures that one can choose from, which is done using the penetrant chemical. The penetrant chemical also makes the concrete floors harder.

Ways of making polished concrete

The polishing effect on concrete using the penetrant makes it smoother and shinier. There are two basic ways of how you can obtain a polished concrete floor. We will discuss those two points later, but first, we will see how the concrete is ground to make it finer.

Polished Concrete Flooring

The grinding process for concrete

In this process, the concreter uses small diamond grits, which can be fitted into grinding discs. There are various grating diamond abrasives found for obtaining various textures on polished concrete surfaces. The basic use of a grinding machine with a fixed diamond grit attached to the grating disc is what makes the concrete finer. The larger, coarser particles inside the concrete are turned into fine concrete particles that make the concrete surface smoother from a rough surface. For standard grating of the concrete, a size of less than 100 grated diamonds should be used. The more finer you want to make the concrete surface, the finer it has to be the diamond grate, and the more is the cost. But this also makes the concrete surface shinier and smoother.

Polishing methods

After the grinding process for concrete is complete for residential polished concrete flooring, the labourers soon turn into polishing the concrete, which is the last process. This is more of an extensive process with two types of methods being used generally. The wet method the dry method for concrete polishing.

Wet method

In the wet method, when the grinding machine is used for polishing, water is used. Water has a huge role to play during the polishing part of the concrete surface. It reduces the dust by settling it off when the grinding machine is in full swing making the concrete surface polishing. It also acts as a lubricant and reduces friction. The high amounts of friction can cause overheating of the grinding machines damaging them entirely. Water will bind to the surface, thereby increasing the life of the surface for polishing abrasives.

Dry method

This is a more cost-friendly process that is used for large commercial spaces. Using the dry method residential polished concrete flooring, you can install the floor faster. Within the dry method, no use of water is done. Instead, the floor polisher is attached to an internal vacuum system that helps to suck off the dry dust particles of concrete on the surface. The dry method is rarely used for homes unless the area is large such as a big hallway or a large drawing-room.

Conclusion

This informative blog on residential polished concrete flooring would have given you enough information about the right methods of polishing concrete flooring. Make sure that you hire the best concrete contractor for this task so that you don’t end up regretting it later.