Concrete garage floors and pads in Waterloo
A garage slab poured on the Waterloo Moraine's sand and gravel generally drains well, but drainage below the slab does not answer the separate question of what happens once a coating goes on top of it. Skip the vapour barrier and the concrete effectively shares the ground's moisture forever, because nothing separates the two once the slab is poured. That is exactly why coatings blister: the finish seals the surface while moisture is still trying to get out, and it has nowhere left to go.
Polyaspartic wins on speed, hot-tire resistance, and UV stability. Epoxy wins on one thing only: it can be formulated to actually manage rising moisture as a base coat. That is why a correctly built floor rarely uses just one of them. The floors we build in Waterloo commonly pair a moisture-managing epoxy base, used where testing calls for it, with a polyaspartic topcoat carrying the actual traffic.
A warm tire is doing more than sitting there: plasticizers inside the rubber migrate outward as it heats, and an under-cured coating gives them somewhere to bond, which is what the dark, soft marks at the tire path actually are. There is no shortcut around this: the coating needs its full cure time before a vehicle goes back in, no matter how dry it looks on top.
An unheated garage in Waterloo tracks the outside temperature closely enough that it goes through the same freezing and thawing as an open driveway, only the salt a car brings in lands on a much smaller patch of floor, repeatedly, all season. Structurally, fibre goes through the whole pour for shrinkage control, and rebar gets added anywhere the slab crosses disturbed backfill from the foundation excavation or has to carry a lift's weight. The concrete mix is the same one we use under concrete driveways. More of this work is on our concrete garage floors page, and the rest of what we build sits under our Waterloo service area.
The moraine's gravel drains better than most of what we pour on, and it still answers nothing about the coating. Epoxy garage floors in Kitchener and garage floor coatings in Guelph begin with the same moisture test for that reason.
