100% solids epoxy
The only layer thick enough to be called a floor
Solids content is the single number that separates a resin floor from a painted one, and it is the number least likely to appear on a quote. It is simply how much of what is in the tin stays on the floor. At 100% solids, all of it does.
A solvent-thinned epoxy might be 60% solids, so almost half of every litre evaporates into the room during cure. A water-based garage kit is nearer 40%. What is left behind is not only thinner, it has shrunk while curing, and shrinkage is stress locked into the film.
What the thickness buys
At 1.5 to 2 mm the base coat is thick enough to bridge the ordinary hairline movement in a slab, thick enough to be ground back and repolished after a decade instead of replaced, and thick enough to carry a broadcast of flake or quartz without the chip sitting proud of it.
It is also what a wheel is actually resting on. Point load from a loaded pallet truck is carried by the resin down into the slab, and a film a few hundred microns thick has nothing to carry it with.
What it costs, honestly
It is the most expensive material on this page by a distance, and it is the reason our quote is not the cheapest one you will get. A 100% solids epoxy at 2 mm uses roughly two litres per square metre. There is no version of that arithmetic that competes with a tin that covers twelve square metres.
It is also unforgiving. There is no thinning it to make it go further, and once it is mixed the clock runs whether it is on the floor or not.
Where it is the wrong choice
Epoxy is rigid, and it does not like heat. Above about 60 °C at the surface it softens, and under steam cleaning it will let go regardless of how well it was laid. A commercial kitchen, a dairy or a wash bay is a urethane cement floor, not this one. That is not a preference, it is a property of the resin.
Left as its own topcoat it also ambers in sunlight. In a showroom or a daylit garage the base coat is the body and the polyaspartic above it is the skin; using epoxy for both is how a white floor turns cream on one side of the room.
How to tellFind a threshold, a drain or a doorway where the floor has to stop, and look at it edge-on. A solids floor shows a visible lip you can feel with a fingernail. A water-based coating stops at nothing you can see, because there is nothing there to see.
What to ask
Ask for the solids content and the litres per square metre, and multiply them out. Those two numbers together tell you how thick your floor will be, and a quote that will not give you either is telling you something on its own.