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Buyer's guide

How to read a coating warranty.

The word "lifetime" does a lot of selling and very little covering. Ten minutes with the fine print protects you more than any pitch, and you don't need a lawyer, just this page.

What "lifetime" often excludes

Pull the fine print on a typical lifetime coating warranty and you'll find some mix of these carved out:

• Moisture vapor rising through the slab, the top cause of basement coating failure
• Concrete cracking, including cracks that telegraph through the coating
• Hot-tire marks and pickup, the classic garage failure
• Hydrostatic pressure, water pushing up from below
• Chemical spills and stains
• UV fade near garage doors and windows

Read that list twice. Those are the ways floors actually fail. A warranty that excludes all of them covers the floor against almost nothing that happens to floors. Some also end the day the house sells, which matters if you're coating before a move.

What a fair warranty looks like

Four things, none of them exotic:

• It separates product from workmanship. The manufacturer stands behind the material, the installer stands behind the install, and the paper says who owns what.
• It covers materials and labor. A warranty that ships you a bucket but charges you the crew is a coupon, not a warranty.
• It handles moisture up front. The honest approach prices a moisture-tolerant system into the quote when a slab needs one, instead of writing moisture into the exclusions and onto you.
• You can read it. Plain terms, no decoder ring.

Where we stand

Our written workmanship warranty runs one year and covers the things prep controls: adhesion, peeling, and delamination, with labor included. We tell you what it doesn't cover before you sign, not after a claim. And because we deal with moisture at the quote instead of the fine print, the biggest "gotcha" in the industry never makes it to your floor in the first place.

A warranty that excludes moisture on a basement floor excludes the way basement floors actually fail. Read that line before any other.