Why We Don’t Fill Expansion Joints When Coating Your Floor

First of all, there are two types of joints – expansion joints and control joints.  Lets explain what they are:

Expansion Joints are the V Shaped grooves in your concrete next to the stem wall

Control Joints are the other joints in your floor.

In garage construction, control joints are shallow cuts or trowel-cut made into the concrete slab garage floor surface, to encourage random shrinkage cracks to occur at pre-determined, less visible locations, while expansion joints are full-depth gaps filled with compressible material (Felt), along the outside, providing a complete separation between adjacent concrete sections to allow for significant thermal expansion and contraction without cracking the slab.

What this means to how we prep your concrete: We treat both of the above the same.

We Don’t Fill Expansion Joints / Control Joints

1. Expansion joints are designed to allow concrete slabs to expand and contract with temperature changes, preventing cracking and damage. The concrete expands into the floor joints, which relieves the pressure.
2. Filling expansion joints will prevent necessary movement. Expansion joints create space for concrete slabs to move. Filling them with rigid materials restricts this movement and defeats the purpose of the joints and then can cause stress and cracking.
3. Filling expansion joints can lead to concrete cracking. When concrete expands and contracts, it needs space to do so. If this movement is restricted, the stress will be relieved by cracking the concrete.
4. Filling expansion joints can lead to buckling and lifting. In extreme cases, the pressure from restricted movement can cause concrete to buckle or lift, especially in freezing and thawing cycles.
5. Filling expansion joints can compromise structural integrity. Over time, constant stress and cracking can weaken the concrete structure, potentially leading to more significant problems.
6. If you fill the joints, you risk the material being squeezed out in the future – like dried up toothpaste.

What we do at Colorado Springs Garage Floors is to put our product into the control joint or expansion joint.  We don’t fill expansion joints / control joints with caulking or sika.

This allows for some give in the joints still.  If there is movement or cracking, it is done down below the product, and at the most you might see some cracking if you look straight down into the crack… barely noticeable as our product is flexible.

At Colorado Springs Garage Floors we don’t fill expansion / control joints, as it is not the best thing for the life of your garage floor

We put our polyaspartic floor coating over them for consistency in your floor coating, giving you a seamless finish.
And don’t worry, our coatings will not crack with concrete expansion – it is tough and flexible enough to withstand the expansion and contraction of your concrete.