What is the difference between full flake broadcast and partial broadcast on a garage floor?

A flake floor is not paint with sprinkles on top. The chips are structural. They go into the wet base coat while it is still open, the excess gets scraped and vacuumed off the next morning, and the topcoat locks the whole thing down. That middle layer is a real part of the system thickness, not decoration, which is why how much flake went down matters more than what color it was.

To refusal is the point where the wet base coat has taken every chip it can hold. Throw more and they sit loose on top with nothing to bond into. Reaching that point takes two or three passes across the same section and a crew willing to keep walking the floor until the gray is gone. When it is done right the surface reads as one continuous color instead of colored dots scattered over a gray field.

Partial broadcast stops well short of that. The installer walks the slab once, throws chips in a pattern, and quits when coverage looks acceptable from standing height. On day one it photographs fine. Base coat is showing between the chips, but base coat is usually tinted gray or tan, and gray gaps between gray flakes disappear in a phone picture taken from six feet up. That is the whole reason the practice survives. The customer cannot see it at handoff, and by the time it shows, the crew is three hundred jobs down the road.

Build thickness goes first. The flake layer is a meaningful share of the total system, so cutting the flake cuts the floor. A partial broadcast garage is measurably thinner than a full one built from the identical products by the identical crew, and thickness is what absorbs the hit when a jack stand comes down hard or a socket drops off the bench. Same materials, same warranty language, less floor.

The wear surface goes second, and this is the one that shows. In a saturated system the topcoat is protecting a dense bed of chip, so as the clear wears in the tire path it exposes more flake underneath and the floor keeps looking like itself. In a thin system the topcoat is sitting directly on base coat across much of the slab. When it wears through there, you get a dull gray patch where the color used to be, and there is nothing to buff back. The only repair is recoating.

Two more losses are easy to miss at signing. Chip texture is most of what keeps a garage floor from turning slick when a wet truck pulls in on a January morning, so the smooth gaps in a thin broadcast are the exact spots where someone slips. And a saturated flake surface is what hides patched cracks, cold joints, and color variation in the concrete underneath. Thin it out and the repair map telegraphs through, which is the most common complaint on floors that were otherwise installed correctly.

You cannot judge flake coverage off a marketing photo, but four checks will tell you almost everything. Ask for pounds of flake per 100 square feet, in writing. A crew that broadcasts to refusal knows its number and will hand it over. A crew that does not will change the subject to warranty length. Anything under 20 pounds per 100 square feet is a partial broadcast no matter what it gets called on the quote. Then ask what happens to the excess, because a full broadcast produces a pile of loose chip that has to be scraped and vacuumed the next morning. If nobody mentions scraping, nobody is broadcasting to refusal.

The other two are visual. Ask for a photo taken low and along the floor near a wall or the garage door, because raking light throws shadows into the gaps that a standing photo flattens out, and edges and corners are where a thin throw shows first. And put your hand on a finished floor if the company has one you can visit. A saturated flake surface has continuous texture from wall to wall. A thin one has smooth patches between rough ones, and you will feel the difference in about three seconds.

Slabbr publishes what each build costs and what is in it. One is $6 per square foot, which is $2,650 on a 440 square foot two car garage. Prime is $8, which is $3,520, and adds a moisture vapor barrier under the base coat. Ironclad is $10, which is $4,400, and carries the moisture vapor barrier plus two polyaspartic topcoats for shops and heavy use. Every one of the three includes diamond grinding with HEPA extraction, a moisture read before any product goes down, and crack repair with rigid polymer at no charge. Flake is broadcast to refusal on all three. There is no Slabbr build with a thin broadcast, because coverage is not the line we compete on.