Get Your Feet Wet: The Advantages Of Wet Concrete Floor Grinding, And How To Choose The Right Grinder For The Job
Concrete provides a sturdy, stable floor for many buildings, from small residential garages to sprawling warehouses, and generally requires very little maintenance. However, if your concrete floor is starting to become uneven due to heavy foot or vehicle traffic, has suffered dents and damage from heavy impacts, or needs a new coating of paint or liquid vinyl, it will need to be ground down using a floor grinder to ensure its surface is as level as possible.
For many concrete floor grinding projects, simply applying your floor grinder directly to the concrete and shaving away the top layer until the floor is level is sufficient. However, in many circumstance, a more specialised grinding procedure known as 'wet grinding' can provide numerous benefits.
What is wet grinding, and how does it differ from conventional concrete floor grinding?
Wet grinding has a rather self-explanatory name; instead of applying the floor grinder directly to a dry concrete floor, the concrete is doused in water and the grinding is performed before the concrete is allowed to dry. This form of concrete floor grinding may be a little more complicated and time-sensitive, but it does have numerous benefits over dry concrete floor grinding:
The chief advantage of wet grinding is that it produces significantly less airborne dust than dry grinding; instead, the moistened concrete dust collects at ground level as a semi-solid slurry that can scooped up and disposed of more easily. As well as being significantly less messy than dry grinding, the reduced amount of dust produced by wet grinding also lessens the danger of concrete dust being inhaled by you or your employees, which can cause significant, long-term respiratory problems without proper masks and filtration equipment to filter out the dust.
The layer of water covering your concrete floor also reduces the amount of heat created during the grinding process. This helps to prevent overheating problems with your floor grinder and also prevents the grinding disc itself from becoming warped due to excessive heat; this is particularly useful if your grinder is equipped with a diamond grinding disc, as these disks can be particularly vulnerable to warping and are more expensive to replace.
What should you look for in a floor grinder suitable for wet grinding?
If these advantages have persuaded you that wet grinding is the best grinding method for your concrete floor, choosing a floor grinder that is suitable for this specialised form of grinding will make the task much easier and simpler.
Many floor grinders designed specifically for wet grinding are fitted with an integrated water sprayer, which can be connected to a nearby water supply using a conventional hose. These sprayers wet the floor as it is being ground down, ensuring that the concrete you are currently grinding is sufficiently wet and reducing the amount of water that is used overall.
As you can imagine, wet grinding can leave some floor grinders more vulnerable to rust problems, and moisture can collect in parts of a grinder that cannot be dried and cleaned easily. To prevent ongoing corrosion problems, try to find a floor grinder with exposed components made of aluminium or stainless steel rather than ordinary steel, as these metals are much less vulnerable to moisture damage.