Polished concrete surface prep can be found in many commercial buildings including warehouses, restaurants, garages, office buildings, and retail stores. There are several advantages that polished concrete creates an excellent work surface.

Cheap and Easy to Maintain

Commercial buildings exist to make money. Any money you spend on maintenance can and will reduce the profitability of the commercial building. It doesn’t mean that you should skimp on the necessary maintenance. However, the prudent commercial building owner will avoid any unnecessary maintenance.

Polished concrete is both easy and inexpensive to maintain. Whether you need to repair a damaged floor or touch up the entire floor for a new tenant, you do not need to replace anything. Rather, you use a concrete crack repair kit to fix any deep damage, then re-polish the floor. After one or two polishing steps with metal bond diamond tools or resin diamond  polishing pads, the floor will look like new.

Better Traction

Smooth, dry surfaces have more surface tension than rough surfaces. Polished concrete provides a high amount of surface tension to grip your employees’ shoes to prevent slips and falls. Moreover, polished concrete releases this surface tension easily as your employees walk on it. This is different from a rough surface that may grip your employees’ shoes, but also create a tripping hazard when it does not readily release them.

The benefits of a polished work surface are even more profound on tires, such as carts and forklifts. The polished surface provides the grip needed to operate the vehicle safely, but does not wear the tires the way a rough surface would. This means the polished surface could save you the time and cost of replacing tires as frequently as would be required for a rough concrete surface.

Stronger and Harder

Polished concrete is stronger and harder than most other flooring options, including unpolished concrete. The concrete pore filler reinforces the surface of the concrete so that it is less prone to cracking and chipping.

From an engineering perspective, concrete is strong against compression forces, but weak against tension forces. However, the resins in the pore filler resist tensile forces that tend to pull concrete apart. By combining the tensile strength of the resins with the compression strength of the concrete, the treated concrete floor is much stronger than an untreated floor.