Outgassing Polyurethane Floor

The fumes and odors left behind after restoring wood flooring can be a headache literally.

Outgassing polyurethane floor.

The off gassing from these chemicals pose a variety of long term and short term health effects from headaches and nausea to damage to the liver kidneys and the central nervous. Water based polyurethane can have less of an offensive odor when compared to oil based products but floors require at least four coats to achieve the desired level of protection. The project featured here is a 2 400 sf floor in a colorado barn. The requirement for the flooring was a high performance epoxy using our endura e21 self priming 100 solids epoxy.

It has been commonly used in home products for decades in everything from certain types of wood flooring to. In most cases the bubbles are caused by air getting trapped during the mechanical mixing of the resin and hardener. Voc off gassing is most acute during application and the drying of hardwood floor finishes. Formaldehyde is an ever present colorless gas that can give off a pickle like smell.

Outgassing is most commonly an issue in epoxy coatings creating small pinhead sized bubbled that can appear sporadically over the floor and which can even form small craters. Even long after these finishes have dried however smaller amounts of vocs continue to off gas into the.