Epoxy & Garage Floor Coatings

Two reasons, both preparation. They rely on acid etching rather than diamond grinding, which does not produce a consistent mechanical profile for the coating to lock into. And they include no moisture testing, so if vapour is driving up through your slab the coating is being pushed off from underneath regardless of how carefully you rolled it. The product in the box is not usually the problem, the two steps it omits are.

Not a correctly built one. A properly ground slab with an epoxy base and a polyaspartic or urethane topcoat handles road salt, meltwater and hot-tire pickup for a decade or more. What salt destroys is a thin, single-component "garage floor paint" over an unprepared slab, which is what most failed floors turn out to be.

It measures how much water vapour is moving up through your concrete slab from the soil beneath it. Concrete on grade without an intact vapour barrier can transmit a surprising amount, and that vapour pressure will lift a coating off from underneath months after it was applied. Testing costs very little and it is the difference between a floor that lasts and a very expensive disappointment. We do not quote a system before we know the number.

Yes, and basements are actually more likely to fail moisture testing than garages because they sit deeper in the soil profile. The test result drives the system: a slab with high vapour transmission needs a moisture-tolerant primer or a full vapour-mitigation membrane before the decorative system goes on. If it fails badly enough, the honest answer is to fix the drainage first.