Using Concrete Acid Stain

Staining a Concrete Floor can be a great way to create a final flooring solution for your home or business with a very trending and popular look. There are many advantages to staining concrete vs. putting another surface over concrete. For one, you don’t need to buy any more materials because the concrete is already there. Another important and often overlooked aspect is the ease of maintenance and the durability of concrete over other solid surface alternative. So let’s take a look at what it takes to stain a concrete floor.

The first step in staining a concrete floor is look over the floor for any obvious defects that could affect it as a safe flooring such as large holes or elevated cracks. If holes exist in the flooring you want to stain, they can easily be filled with a polymer modified concrete patching compound. Cracks on the other had will need to be ground with a diamond grinder in order to get them level with the rest of the floor.

After the floor as been looked over for major issues, the next step is to clean the concrete extremely well. While it’s often recommend to use a concrete soap, water, and a push broom, I like to take it a step further. By using an orbital floor scrubber, also called a swing machine, you will get the floor much cleaner and in turn end up with a much nicer outcome.

Using water and a black pad on your floor scrubber go over the entire floor in a back and forth motion to insure you are covering the whole floor. Before the material dries that you have worked up, use a squeegee to move all the water and suspended dirt in the water out of the room you are getting ready to stain.

Now clean, you are ready to apply your acid stain. The floor doesn’t have to be completely dry from your cleaning efforts, but be sure there is no pudding on the floor. Most concrete acid stain is diluted 1:1 with water, meaning one gallon of acid stain to one gallon of water. Mix the solution and pour into a no drip pump sprayer.

Be sure anything that you don’t want stain on has been cover up with plastic or paper. Once you are sure everything is covered you may now start applying the stain. Apply stain with a circular motion saturating the concrete, but not creating large puddles all over, although some pudding is fine. Repeat the process thought the whole floor.

Now you must wait until the acid stain has dried completely. Once you see that it’s dry you can decide if you think it needs another coat or start cleaning the residue off the floor. To clean the residue off the floor using the same floor scrubber that you used to clean the floor, but this time with a white pad, not the black pad. Black pads are very aggressive and may remove too much of the color on the floor. Apply water to the floor just as you did in the cleaning steps and continue throughout the whole floor.

The floor is now clean. You do at this point still have the option of staining the floor one more time if you would like a darker color. If you feel the outcome is fine, you are ready for the final step of sealing.

Wait until the floor is completely dry before you do any sealing. Because different stain manufactures recommend different sealers for each of their products, be sure to check with them on what sealer to use.