Garage floor painting / damp

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Hi Guys,
Just trying to get my detached garage a bit nicer as a bit of a workshop.
I want to either paint the floor or use floor tiles, so have been trying to establish if I have a DPM in the garage floor or not.

The garage is single skin with concrete floor and was built in around 1983.
When we had some heavy rain the other month I had water getting in at DPC level at the back wall, but now I believe I have fixed this. The earth was slightly above the DPC and has now been removed by digging a trench to 2 bricks below DPC.
However I have used a moisture meter around the rest of the floor and in the middle there seems to be below 1% moisture content, but nearer the edges its around the 2-2.5% range especially where I had a piece of wood laying on the floor.

Does this point to there not being a DPM under the concrete slab?
If so do any of the concrete sealers work so I can paint it and not have any issues.

Many thanks for your help.

 

[Swwils]

Unfortunately unless it was a really decent moisture meter the result is unlikely to be accurate.

Maybe a neighbor had some work done and can say with confidence.

In any case you could lay a dpm or liquid dpm as if doing a conversion.

 

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Unfortunately unless it was a really decent moisture meter the result is unlikely to be accurate.

Maybe a neighbor had some work done and can say with confidence.

In any case you could lay a dpm or liquid dpm as if doing a conversion.

Thanks for the advise, it is a Lidl moisture meter, but seems fairly good, I bought it mainly to test wood for the log burner.
I've only been here 8 months, but none of the neighbours have had any work down that would confirm if there was a DPM or not.
Is there a liquid DPM that I can put down and then paint over? or do they all need a screed over the top?

Thanks for your help

 

[Swwils]

It really depends on what you want to do and what your budget is.

Those budget meters are kinda only good for wood, and even then only to give an indication of "wet or dry" no accurate measurement in-between.

If you have solved a small issue and the situation is improving, this might be good enough for a basic workshop floor.

If you were prepping for a flawless epoxy floor it might be different!

 

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It really depends on what you want to do and what your budget is.

Those budget meters are kinda only good for wood, and even then only to give an indication of "wet or dry" no accurate measurement in-between.

If you have solved a small issue and the situation is improving, this might be good enough for a basic workshop floor.

If you were prepping for a flawless epoxy floor it might be different!

Thanks for your help, All I really want to do is paint the floor to keep down the dust and make it a nice area to work on a classic car which will also be stored in there. So I'd like to try to have as dry an area as possible without having to rebuild the garage.

What i don't want to do is paint over the floor and have it lift off due to damp rising up from the concrete. So I think some sort of liquid membrane with floor paint over the top would suffice.
Not sure on budget but i would say hundreds rather than thousands.

As a side note the garage has a insulated sectional garage door to the front so the garage is quite good from that aspect.

 

[Tigercubrider]

I have an attached garage, and used Floor Paint which has begun to flake a bit but the original floor was prone to dust anyway.
It's still good after 20 odd years of working on motorbikes with kickstarts apart from a few problem areas that were there before the paint.

We converted a mate's detached garage by using bitumen paint, plastic and boarding

I'd look into epoxy floor coatings if I were you? They do require a clean floor to start with, so if it's oil stained maybe an alternative.
The best time to do this is summer, when you can empty the garage without risk of rain.
If you lie on the floor a lot, maybe plastic clip together tiles?

 

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Thanks, yes that seems to be the way to go. I have found a couple of places that seem to do an epoxy floor coating and liquid DPM in one. Not cheap, but ideally I only want to do it once.

Found these:
https://www.permagard.co.uk/liquid-epoxy-damp-proof-membrane-5-litres
https://safeguardstore.co.uk/safegu...53.1829926989.1631191021-792653472.1631191021

If anyone has used any of them or anything they can recommend that would be helpful.

Many thanks