You can build a highly profitable coatings business, or you can join the long list of contractors who struggle to stay afloat.

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CleanPrime probably isn't more toxic than any other industrial floor coating. But I love you too much not to go pretty hard on the safety stuff. You only got one body, bruh.

Here's the part professional installers really need to hear: epoxy accidents are rare. Epoxy sensitization isn't. The thing that gets people isn't one bad day — it's a thousand careless little ones. Epoxy resin and amine hardeners are some of the most sensitizing materials in the trades. Let them touch your skin enough times and your own immune system flips a switch it can't flip back. After that, you're allergic to all epoxy, everywhere, for good — and your career in this industry is finished. I've watched guys with real talent get chased out of the trade by a rash they couldn't shake. So understand the goal here: we're not protecting you from this afternoon. We're protecting the next twenty years.

Three fronts — the air you breathe, the skin you touch it with, and the mess you leave behind.

1. Own the air

Make the room move air in one direction: clean in, dirty out, never the same air twice. Three pieces do that.

• Makeup air in. Open something on one side of the room so fresh air has a way in. Pull air out with no way for new air to enter and you choke the whole system — the machine just hums and moves nothing.

• Directional flow across the work. Set it so the air travels past you and the wet coating and keeps going, instead of swirling around your head.

• Vapor out, outdoors. A negative-air machine pushes the fumes through a duct to the outside — not back into the room. Recirculating cuts the smell but leaves the vapor. That's lipstick on a problem.

Run the room at slight negative pressure so vapor sneaks out the cracks instead of into the rest of the house, and put the exhaust well clear of doors, windows, HVAC intakes, and people. You haven't solved anything if you're just feeding the fumes to the family in the living room.

For the machine: you want a negative-air scrubber with a HEPA stage and an activated-carbon stage ahead of it — HEPA grabs particulate, carbon adsorbs the solvent vapor and odor. I ran Lavina scrubbers as a contractor (mine took 16x20 filters); there are better deals out there now, so shop it. What matters is that it takes a carbon pre-filter sized to fit and moves enough air for the room. Again, this is up to you, but here’s my best recommendation as of June 2026: get some of these, outfit them with filters like these and get enough ductwork like this to get the fume out of there. Double check and do the job like a true professional.

One honest limit on carbon: it adsorbs vapor until it's full, then quietly quits on you. It's a helper, not a hero. When the odor starts climbing back, the carbon's spent — swap it.

Keep the ducting short — 20 to 25 feet of flex, insulated or reinforced if you've got it, and few bends. Every elbow steals airflow.

And remember this stuff is flammable — the acetone in it flashes well below freezing. Solvent vapor is heavier than air, so it sinks and pools down low where your nose never finds it. Before you open a kit, kill every ignition source in the space: pilot lights, water heaters, space heaters, anything that throws a spark when it cycles. Good directional airflow is also what keeps vapor from ever building to the point where a stray spark matters.

2. Protect your lungs

Air first, respirator second. In a well-scrubbed open room, a properly fit-tested respirator with organic-vapor cartridges carries you. In a tight basement, an occupied house, or anywhere the air just won't move, step up to a PAPR.

Your nose is the gauge. Smell solvent inside the mask and the cartridge has broken through — change it right then, not at lunch. Cartridges keep drinking in contaminants on the shelf too, so store them sealed in a bag or they'll be half-dead before you strap them on. And a fit test is worthless through a beard — stubble breaks the seal, and a broken seal is just theater.

3. Protect your skin — this is the one that ends careers

Everything above keeps you comfortable today. This part decides whether you're still doing this work at sixty.

Gloves always — but thin nitrile is not a force field. Epoxy, amine, and solvent all work their way through cheap gloves given time. Wear a real chemical-resistant glove, swap them the second they're contaminated, and quit touching your phone, the doorknob, your face, and your coffee with product on your fingers. You'll smear it everywhere you didn't mean to and dose yourself all day long.

Here's the trap nearly everybody falls into: get epoxy on your skin, reach for acetone to wipe it off. Don't. Solvent strips your skin's natural barrier and drives the epoxy deeper — you're not cleaning it off, you're pushing it in. Soap, water, and a real hand cleaner, nothing else. Better yet, set up so it never lands on you in the first place.

Eyes too — wraparound glasses at a minimum, a face shield when you're mixing or pouring anywhere near overhead. A splash of amine in the eye is a day you'll remember.

4. Handle the waste like it can still bite

Two things in this product bite after you've stopped paying attention.

First, heat. Mixed epoxy doesn't just sit quietly — it reacts, and a leftover mass in a bucket can build enough heat to smoke or scorch. Solvent-soaked rags are their own fire. Don't pile either in a corner and walk off: spread thin scraps so they cure out, and drop solvent rags in a sealed metal can. Once epoxy is fully cured it's inert and harmless — it's the wet, reacting, and solvent-wet stuff that's dangerous.

Second, water. CleanPrime is toxic to aquatic life, so it never goes down a drain, a storm sewer, the dirt, or a creek — not the product, not the rinse, not the tool water. Let it all cure solid, then dispose of the cured material and your spent cartridges by your local hazardous-waste rules.

The whole thing in one breath

Never trust a carbon filter more than a respirator. Never trust a respirator more than fresh air. Use all three — in that order of faith.

Before you crack the first kit, run the list:

• ☐ Room ventilated, exhaust ducted outdoors, makeup air open

• ☐ Negative pressure holding, HVAC protected, occupants out

• ☐ Respirator fit-checked, fresh cartridges in

• ☐ Right gloves on, real hand cleaner staged (not solvent)

• ☐ Every ignition source killed

• ☐ Metal can ready for the rags

Do this every time, and epoxy will give you a long, good career instead of taking one.

Failing to plan is truly planning to fail.

You might oughta check back here every week because I think I could spend the rest of my life building this out with what I learned from decades of managing a high-volume installation company.

Click here for planning tips for terminating at roll-up doors.

Plan on working cleanly, but set up an area where, if you make a little bit of a mess, it's not going to affect anything. That is, put down tape and plastic, and then put RamBoard over the plastic and carpeting over the RAM board.

It's hard to overdo this. Pour acetone liberally on the concrete and mop up with a flat mop. This one from Uline is outstanding.

Have a 2.5 quart measuring container with 64 fl. oz. of acetone ready next to your mixing station to promptly clean your mixer with. Put equal parts of resin and hardener in. Mix for two minutes with a Jiffy Mixer sized for 2-5 gallon mixes. Clean your mixer by SLOWLY spinning it in the acetone and then wiping with WHITE microfiber towels these are excellent.

See the tools page for the best equipment to apply this stuff.

After mixing, allow the mixture to rest for 5 minutes (induction time).

Transfer the mixed material into the Wooster polypropylene paint bucket or equivalent.

Use a non-shedding roller with a nap of at least three-eighths of an inch. Three-quarter or one inch is even better. Using light pressure, apply a thin even coat, re-rolling every square foot at least ten times.

Re-coat with a UV-stable, 2-component coating between 2 and 24 hours after installation. THIS IS AN INDUSTRIAL PRIMER - IT IS NOT OPTIMIZED FOR ANYTHING OTHER THAN INTERPHASE BONDING.

Chemical bonding is generally preferable to mechanical bonding, so re-coat sooner rather than later.

The the CleanPrime process is different than a typical epoxy process in so much as you have a 90-minute working time and every square foot should be re-rolled ten times. If you roll it that much, it will likely tack up enough for you to put another coat on it with no waiting.

On very non-porous substrates, it may be 4-5 hours before the coating has hardened enough to not be damaged by swing shoes for the subsequent coat.

If the coating has cured for more than 24 hours at 70°F, aggressively sand and solvent wipe before applying another coat.

Completely React Hardener and Resin to create inert solid waste rather than ever dumping this down any drain or putting it in a landfill.

Crocodile Cloths are sold at your local Farrell Calhoun paint store, and words. cannot describe how much I love these things.

With this material, you can unlock tons of projects that create much more value than the typical garage epoxy. 

It is not magical snake-oil though.

First off, you have to remove contaminants from the concrete. I frankly got overconfident with this material and sought some highly contaminated concrete to coat to make a point. I failed terribly, and maybe someday I’ll make a video of it for you - hit us up for the raw footage if you’d like. The CleanPrime stuck incredibly well despite the contaminants, but the topcoat didn’t adhere to CleanPrime because this penetrating primer can mobilize contaminants that then resurface and defeat the topcoat. This widens the margin of success more than any material known. However, crap is crap and you need to get it out of there before coating.

Secondly, 35% of the floors on remodeling projects are a bad idea to coat with epoxy: Sheet Vinyl, LVP, and WPC have plasticizers that will reek havoc with epoxy in the long run. The problem isn't getting epoxy to stick to vinyl today; the problem is keeping it stuck after years of movement, heat cycles, and plasticizer migration. VCT has enough mineral content and rigidity that it works, but otherwise, Premera’s Fusion Primer is a better material for vinyl. (If you’re interested, that’s because it’s wholly inorganic, so the plasticizers don’t migrate out of vinyl into epoxy. It's available at your local Ferrell Calhoun paint store. Their re-coat window is tricky on concrete in my experience (due to the varying porosity - see this video for more info)

Also, avoid attempting to coat silicone-containing materials, fluoropolymers (such as Teflon®), polyethylene, polypropylene, waxes, oils, release agents, and other low-surface-energy contaminants may prevent adhesion.

The other little gotcha is something that almost nobody talks about. DENSIFIED CONCRETE MIGHT BE A LONG-TERM PROBLEM FOR COATINGS IN GENERAL. 

Arizona Polymer Flooring (and therefore Supercrete) address this in their technical data sheets for Vapor Solve. As a manufacturer, I know that by increasing the amount of silane in the epoxy, you can get a good initial bond. However, my experience and understanding of how products like the DRYCRETE Moisture Stop (total garbage) and The Ashford Formula (best warehouse finish ever) work lead me to wonder if the nearly indefinite growth of calcium silicate hydrate (CSH) might be a long-term problem when coating these floors. 

When working with unfamiliar substrates, always perform a test area before full application. 

An old carpenter once told me “Cory, you’ll never know if you built it too strong.”

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Just like the Marketing, Estimating, and Sales page, there’s a lot you might want to learn about the business-end of the coating business in order to be successful.

Invoicing, collecting, financial management, operations systems, organizational development, and a greater purpose behind it all is the other half of what separates the wildly successful from those just enduring miserably. Click below for more info

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