Smith's Green Clean

Smith's Green Clean is a 1 gallon concrete cleaning product used in the wash stage of coating prep. Cleaning is the step that gets skipped most often and the one that causes the most expensive callbacks, because everything downstream depends on it.

The order of operations on a coating job is fixed for a reason. Clean the slab first, then prepare it mechanically, then coat it. If you grind a dirty floor, the grinder does not remove contamination, it distributes it. Whatever was sitting on the surface gets driven into the fresh profile you just opened, and the coating bonds to that instead of to concrete. Cleaning first means the diamonds are cutting clean concrete and the profile you create stays clean.

Cleaning is also not surface preparation. A washed slab is clean, not profiled. It has no mechanical texture for a coating to key into, so a wash never replaces diamond grinding under a high-performance system. The two steps do different jobs and you need both.

Use the dilution, dwell time and rinse procedure the manufacturer's instructions give for your situation rather than a general rule, and always test in a small area before you do a whole floor, particularly on decorative, colored or previously sealed concrete. Wear gloves and eye protection, rinse thoroughly, and let the slab dry fully before the next step. Residual cleaner left in the surface is a bond breaker, and a wet slab is not a floor you can coat.

For a heavily oil-contaminated bay, a general cleaner may not be enough on its own. Call 817-676-6793 and describe the floor and we will tell you honestly whether a cleaner will get you there or whether you are looking at a dedicated degreaser or a different plan.