Floors can be costly but they can be far more costly if neglected, abused or inadequately repaired. What’s more, floor treatments can be more complex than they seem. Take, for example, floor markings, an essential requisite for any warehouse for safety reasons. One may ask what’s so complex about floor markings but the fact is that choosing warehouse line marking often leads to some form of compromise, said Chris Hopkirk of ASG Services. It will be necessary, therefore, to understand one’s key business priorities before making an informed decision.
The key elements that impact the decision-making process are: money, time, disruptions to the operation and durability. Quite often customers have to make a compromise between these elements, as when some customers are too busy to wait for materials to cure. The downside, however, of completing the job speedily can be poor durability.
A good product/service supplier will provide the customer with the options available and prompt the right questions, like how long it will last, will it affect food, how long it will take to cure. There are at least nine floor line treatments but for those operators concerned mostly by curing time the UV floor coatings would be a good choice. It is a high-performance, instant cure coating system for concrete floors used with either shot blast or diamond-ground preparations.
Joint repairs can be problematic without due consideration. When, for example, choosing the materials it can have a critical impact on the disruption period and, as with forklifts, it’s important to choose the right repairer to get the best maintenance deal. Repairs carried out on concrete joints can fail prematurely if poorly done, showing signs of poor concrete compaction around the metal angles, and excessive signs of premature wear and degradation once subjected to traffic from materials handling equipment. The type of concrete mix can be important in terms of returning a customer to normal work. When CG Flooring, for example, repaired two expansion joints each 70 met long for a tyre company each phase of the work could be competed and returned to the customer within seven days. If a standard concrete mix had been used it would have taken 28 days.
Potentially the most costly of floor repair problems are those where the floor slab has dished owing to poor subsoil conditions. This can negate the use of VNA truck operations. At one time the problem would have required a costly and disruptive pile driving solution. Fortunately, a much cheaper and far less disruptive solution is the injection of foam into the voids of the subsoil that have caused the dishing, a system that has now been used in the UK to great effect for over 20 years.
Sometimes warehouse operators want to convert part of their warehouses from a wide-aisle scenario to a VNA operation, where floor flatness becomes more critical. The more conventional approach to this was to use the long strip method but now the Laser Screed and Laser Ground method within the aisles, where necessary, is far less disruptive.
When entering new warehouse premises which tick all the right boxes, bar one, that solitary exception can be a floor slab that is too thin for the planned storage operation. Majestic Wine found this so when its chosen site had only a 10 mm thick floor slab and so it would require substantial changes to withstand the projected loads. The Storage Equipment Centre offered a solution based on single pallet bays and a dissipation plate to reduce the leg load. It was significantly more cost effective than using a channel dissipation plate or making changes to a warehouse floor.
Warehouse floor neglect is common in the UK, with often costly consequences. A due diligence process and careful choice of supplier after adequate comparisons should prevent nasty surprises and extract the best, tailored solution.
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