Symptom → cause · Florida-weighted
Peeling, flaking, hot-tire pickup: what's wrong with your garage floor
Almost every coating failure is one of five problems. Find your symptom below — the cause tells you whether it's a recoat, a repair, or a full strip-and-redo.
1. Peeling in sheets or large flakes
Likely cause: adhesion failure from bad prep. The coating bonded to oil, dust, old paint, or smooth troweled concrete instead of the slab. Acid-etching (common in DIY jobs) doesn't profile concrete the way diamond grinding does.
Fix: there's no patching this — the failed areas must be stripped, the slab ground properly, and the coating reapplied. This is the most expensive failure to have.
2. Blistering / bubbling
Likely cause: moisture. Florida slabs transmit ground moisture; coating over a damp slab traps vapor that pushes the film up from below. Outgassing on hot days makes it worse.
Fix: moisture testing first (calcium chloride or RH probe — ask any pro quoting the repair how they test). A moisture-mitigation primer may be needed before recoating.
3. Hot-tire pickup
Likely cause: under-cured or wrong chemistry for the load. Hot tires soften incompletely cured coatings and pull them off the slab. Florida compounds it: the floor is already hot, the tire is hot, and humidity may have extended the cure.
Fix: check whether the warranty explicitly covers hot-tire pickup (many exclude it). Prevention is cure discipline — don't park on the schedule the installer gave you for Arizona; ask for the humid-Florida schedule.
4. Yellowing / ambering
Likely cause: UV degradation of epoxy. Normal epoxy chemistry ambers under direct sunlight — the garage entrance is where it shows first.
Fix: cosmetic, not structural. A UV-stable polyaspartic topcoat over the existing epoxy stops further yellowing. See the chemistry comparison →
5. Cracking through the coating
Likely cause: the slab moved. Rigid epoxy can't bridge a working crack — the crack telegraphs straight through.
Fix: cracks need flexible repair (polyurea-based crack fill) before any coating goes down. If your slab cracks actively, ask about polyurea systems, the most flexible of the three chemistries. Compare all three →
The uncomfortable truth
Most of these failures are prep or chemistry-selection failures, not product failures. That's why the hiring questions in the FAQ focus on moisture testing, grinding method, and cure scheduling — the answers predict the outcome better than the brand name on the bucket.