Are Polished Concrete Floors Slippery?

So Are Polished Concrete Floors Slippery?

Yes, generally speaking, but it is no more slippery than any other hard flooring surface. Add water to it though and like any other hard surface it will be slippery.  When clean Polished Concrete Floors offer as much grip as a regular concrete floor.

As a general rule Polished Concrete Floors are slip-resistant. Even when wet, Polished Concrete Floors offer significantly higher slip resistance than tile or wood floors. When installed properly, Polished Concrete Floors reduces slip and fall liabilities and insurance costs for business owners!

Polished Concrete Floors arent necessarily slippery when wet, however, using a flooring safety test measurement standard found that using Polished Concrete offers superior slip resistance, even when it is wet. The way water interacts with a porous surface like a polished concrete surface can help offer extra grip. That said, the same porous polished concrete surface also means that water isn’t easily absorbed or wiped uniformly, which results in a temporary wet spot.

For outdoors, however, we would not normally recommend Polished Concrete Floors, for outside the alternative for these areas is Honed Concrete or a Grind and Seal. The reason for this is to provide alternatives for a more slip and UV-resistant finish.

Because of their high coefficient of friction, Polished Concrete Floors are 20% to 50% more slip-resistant than the national standard for low-slip floors! In physics, the coefficient of friction measures the resistance of motion between two surfaces relative to the force (gravity) holding the two surfaces together.

However, like any other type of flooring, chemicals, and spilled oil can still reduce friction on a Polished Concrete Floor, turning it into a safety hazard. If you want a floor for commercial use or need flooring for an oil distillation plant, it’s best to choose a flooring type that offers a strong, chemically resistant coating.

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