High-stakes industrial maintenance isn’t your basic DIY project. The stakes, costs and risks are much higher; follow these 5 commandments to ensure your maintenance practices line you up for success, not failure.
1\. Match Your Floor Coating to What’s Actually at Risk
While generic-warehouse epoxy floors are durable and cost-effective, they can place your sensitive equipment in jeopardy. Electrostatic discharges can fry electronics or interfere with delicate tools and measurements. So, for buildings such as data centers or electronics manufacturing plants, you need specialized coatings that disperse those discharges. This ESD flooring solution must also limit the amount of particle-emitting material used in the flooring so as not to contaminate an ISO-14644 cleanroom under any particle-emission class.
2\. Don’t Skip Surface Preparation
The quality of the surface preparation can determine if a layer of paint lasts only for three years or if it protects the substrate for its expected ten-year service life. In mission-critical environments, the quality of the surface preparation can make that difference, but the containment of dust from the paint preparation is equally crucial. This is where mission critical facility painting requires a different level of expertise than standard commercial work. HEPA-filtered vacuum sanding is a must.
For structural steel, piping, and mechanical enclosures, proper substrate preparation means removing mill scale, rust, and surface contaminants to the right profile before applying protective coatings. High-solids and moisture-cured coatings on piping help address corrosion under insulation, which is one of the more insidious failure modes in facilities with intensive cooling infrastructure. It develops slowly, stays hidden, and shows up as a structural problem.
3\. Schedule Around Uptime, Not Convenience
It is essential to prioritize a painting or coating project around the uptime needs of your facility. For operations running 24 hours a day, this likely means utilizing a phased approach to work in alternative spaces or during off-peak maintenance hours, and never working on coatings in a live zone with adjoining active equipment.
Preference for phased work is not just for convenience, it’s for safety and protection. Imagine a contractor applying coatings too close to your active, live server racks without adequate containment. Particulates migrate into the hardware, and suddenly, the $10,000 coating job has caused damages and disrupts mission-critical work at magnitudes more. In fact, 25% of Uptime Institute’s 2022 Global Data Survey respondents reported their most recent significant outage cost more than $1 million.
Look for contractors that understand the unique challenges posed by operating within your facility’s constraints and have worked on other projects where coatings were applied with those constraints in mind. Beware the contractors who will tell you this isn’t much different from painting a warehouse.
4\. Use Low-VOC Coatings in Enclosed Industrial Spaces
Emissions from standard coatings that include volatile organic compounds (VOC) are not only harmful to the health of employees. In an enclosed facility with precise HVAC and cooling processes, the off-gassing of coatings can permeate air handling systems, undermine precise hardware, and in certain situations even negatively influence the performance of measuring equipment.
Low-VOC and zero-VOC high-solids coatings have come a long way and are no longer a performance liability. When working in confined or largely unventilated spaces or near active server rooms and laboratory environments, these types of coatings are the only option that should be considered. Again, get it in writing before a coating is ever specified and do not simply take your contractor’s word for it.
5\. Build Inspection into Your Annual Maintenance Cycle
Regular inspections and testing can reveal problems such as pinholes, fish eyes, outgassing, more immediate and non-immediate adhesion leaks. Taking the time to regularly test the coating can prevent these issues from becoming larger, more costly problems down the road. Coating failure is often the early stages of something more severe.
The Bottom Line
Facility managers who oversee high-stakes operations have long known that every cubic foot in a building is connected to every other and that no system can be viewed in isolation. The coating on the floor is not just a “finish.” Nor is the coating on the structural steel, the paint on electrical switchgear or the treatment on mechanical piping. They are not paint and coatings; they are paint and coatings systems.
