Choosing A Hygienic Resin Floor For Restaurant Kitchens
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Choosing A Hygienic Resin Floor For Restaurant Kitchens
Hygiene and restaurant kitchens go hand-in-hand, with strict procedures in place to ensure food hygiene standards are maintained.
However, not many people consider the impact that an ineffective resin floor can have on overall hygiene standards. Mopping your floor with an industrial cleaner won’t do much to eradicate the deeply embedded dirt and bacteria that will reside inside the floor if your resin coating isn’t fit for its purpose.
In this post, we take a look at:
- – Key considerations for choosing a hygienic resin floor
- – The choices you have available
- – The impact that a poor-quality resin floor can have on your or your client’s business.
Choosing A Hygienic Resin Floor For Your Kitchen
Your resin flooring must fulfil a number of key aims and possess certain key attributes to ensure that it’s fit for purpose, including:
- – Durable (long-lasting)
- – Resistant to abrasion and impacts
- – Hygienic
- – Easy to clean
- – Slip-resistant
As you can see, hygiene is just one of the many important functions of your restaurant resin floor, yet all are connected in some way or another.
For example, if your flooring gets damaged in any way, you are instantly increasing the chances of it becoming less hygienic, due to the presence of dirt and bacteria – which we will explore later on in this post.
Resin Floor For Restaurants: Your Choices
There are many different types of resin floor finishes, including (but not limited to) polyurethane (PU) resins, acrylic resins, methacrylate resins, polyester resins, epoxy resins and polyaspartic resins.
Out of all these, PU resin is perhaps the most widely used resin floor for kitchen environments, and as such, your experiences are most likely to be based around this coating.
PU resin has a fairly high compressive strength, making it resistant to scratches, as well as its durability in extreme temperature situations. It is also known as being one of the more cost-effective resin flooring solutions.
However, one of the biggest setbacks with PU resin coating is downtime.
With a drying time of 3-5 hours and a cure time of 3-5 days, you’re looking at potentially a week’s worth of lost business. When you factor in repairs and replacements, PU resin ends up costing you more in the long run.
To explore the difference between PU, Epoxy and Acrylic resins, read our blog post here.
What Makes A Restaurant Kitchen Floor Unhygienic?
Your cleaning practices may be on point, but there are certain elements out of our control, particularly with PU coating, that can have a detrimental impact on the hygiene of your flooring.
Thermo-set plastics such as PU only ever achieve a mechanical bond between the layers of the floor. Over time, stresses can cause delamination and this results in new places for the liquid to penetrate and damage the floor. A build-up of moisture means a build-up of bacteria.
Secondly, as PU coating cures, gas bubbles pass through the resin. This results in small ‘pinholes’ forming on the floor. These craters left by the expelling of the gas will get penetrated through general activity, exposing the layer underneath to dirt and bacteria.
So it is crucial that when selecting a resin floor that you closely consider its vulnerability to the build-up of dirt and bacteria.
We Recommend Our Thermoplastic Resins
As a Thermoplastic Resin, Acrylicon will help you to dramatically improve hygiene standards for your restaurant kitchen floor project, in the event of a repair.
How?
Acrylicon resins can cure and un-cure as the cured resin is reactivated by uncured resin.
So, when one layer is cured, applying un-cured resin on top will cause a chemical reaction at the layer interface and the two layers fuse together. This is called a chemical bond and cannot be undone.
With Acrylicon there is no risk of delamination as there are no cold joints, resulting in no joints for bacteria to proliferate, making for a much more hygienic kitchen floor.
To recap:
- – Restaurant kitchen floors have to fulfil numerous interconnected characteristics for them to be fit for purpose.
- – PU resin has longer cure times and is more susceptible to damage when compared to Acrylicon.
- – Damaged flooring increases the chances of dirt and bacteria residing.
If you want top-quality, long-lasting resin flooring that outperforms others in the market in terms of cure time, longevity and hygiene, then Acrylicon is the option for you.
To arrange a free no-obligation floor survey from one of our local experts, get in touch today.