Self-leveling concrete application - GIF

[Frank S]

We have this in our house (we have hydronic heating - long runs of PEX pipe in the floor with a concrete top). The concrete is batch mixed on site, sand and not gravel. It is pumped into the house. It is called self leveling concrete.

I found one picture that showed the pour:


You can see how runny it is. It dries very smooth, no bubbles, not a hot mix from what I understand, but I don't know much more about it.

Seeing your I am wondering if some epoxy polymers weren't added to the mix to harden the final surface help seal it and prevent it from chalking. or was it sealed after curing?

[BuffaloJohn]

Seeing your I am wondering if some epoxy polymers weren't added to the mix to harden the final surface help seal it and prevent it from chalking. or was it sealed after curing?

There wasn't any epoxy that I saw. They had a mixer outside, bags of some type of cement, a pile of sand, and water.

The concrete was not the final floor. We have tile and engineered hardwood. Tile is glued down, the hardwood is interlocked and floats on a thin membrane. Also, there are no fasteners into the concrete - none anywhere. It is possible to find the pex it the heating system is running and you have a thermal camera, but if you poke a hole in the pex, that would be a nasty fix. If you need to fasten something down, you use the wall, not the floor.

[Frank S]

There wasn't any epoxy that I saw. They had a mixer outside, bags of some type of cement, a pile of sand, and water.

The concrete was not the final floor. We have tile and engineered hardwood. Tile is glued down, the hardwood is interlocked and floats on a thin membrane. Also, there are no fasteners into the concrete - none anywhere. It is possible to find the pex it the heating system is running and you have a thermal camera, but if you poke a hole in the pex, that would be a nasty fix. If you need to fasten something down, you use the wall, not the floor.

If you are going to have a hardwood floor prefinished snap fit floating is the way to go.
A friend of mine was building his house on Vashon Island WA with the heating system you have, in his garage but he wanted 6 of my car stackers Parking lifts in it. So I laid out the grid where the anchors were going to have to be located and told the contractor not to put any tubing in those areas. He said I can read the grid but that tubing can't SO I pre embedded hollow anchors leaving them stick up to FFL and put plastic sleeves over them. I told him I bet that tubing can recognize those.
He said yeah but my men will be stumbling over them and break their necks I said that's your problem I won't be drilling holes in your tubing now either. I don't think he liked my attitude any more than I cared for his. But my friend was happy, and he was the only one I needed to please.