How much blue does Riptide show?
Enough to set the tone, not enough to make it a blue floor. Standing on it, you see a light, cool gray-white floor with a clear blue cast. The blues are about one chip in five: they cool the whole field without taking it over.
Up close you see two distinct blues: a mid slate blue and a much deeper blue, about 10% each. The deep blue is the darkest chip in the blend. There is no black, so the contrast is softer than in a black-speckled blend, and the warm white chip keeps the light tones from reading icy.
Where Riptide works
Pick Riptide when the customer wants color without going bold. It suits interiors with a cool palette: gray or blue cabinets, white walls, chrome and stainless, a home gym, a workshop where the owner is tired of gray, or a business whose brand color is blue.
Riptide and Canyon use the same three light colors (white, off-white and warm white, about 60% of each blend). The other 40% or so is what separates them: Riptide adds cool gray and two blues, Canyon adds taupe, warm gray, black and chocolate. If a customer likes Canyon's lightness but wants it cool, show Riptide.
Sun, UV and topcoat
Keep Riptide out of direct sun where you can, and put a UV-stable (aliphatic) topcoat over it. Bold colors such as these blues can fade early in direct sun, and we have no lightfastness test data for our own chips, so we do not call Riptide UV stable.
An interior garage, basement, gym or shop is a good fit. A garage whose door sits open to afternoon sun, a sunroom or a patio is a poor one. The topcoat matters for the resin too. Standard epoxy has poor UV resistance, and even UV-resistant epoxy can show yellowing on light gray and white floors. On a cool blue-white floor any amber shift is easy to see, so finish with an aliphatic topcoat (aliphatic polyaspartics have a low yellowing tendency) per your resin maker's system guide. The flake guide covers topcoats and UV in more depth.
Dirt and lighting
Riptide hides gray dust, concrete dust and dried road salt. It shows tan mud, rust, oil and black tire marks, because there is no black or brown in the blend to hide them.
Under daylight-color LEDs the blues look crisp and the floor reads blue-gray. Under warm bulbs the whites turn creamy and the blues read darker and grayer. If the customer is choosing for the blue, show chips under the room's real lights.
What base coat goes under Riptide?
Tint the base coat light to medium gray, close to the cool gray chip. Thin spots happen on a single broadcast, and a base in one of the blend's own colors keeps them from reading as flaws.
A gray base turns any thin spot into what looks like one more gray chip. A blue base would push extra blue through wherever coverage is light.
Matching an existing floor
Riptide is comparable in color to Tidal Wave (Torginol). Blue is the color a customer notices first when a match is off, so broadcast a test board on your base coat and compare the blues in particular against the existing floor.
Ordering Riptide for a gym or showroom
A 600 sq ft home gym or showroom (20 x 30 ft) needs 3 boxes of Riptide for a full broadcast: $255 before freight.
Figured at 0.167 lb per sq ft (typical), this floor takes about 100 lb; at 0.20 (planning), 120 lb. Three boxes hold 132 lb, so you finish with 12 to 32 lb left over. Bid it that way: the flake you broadcast costs $0.27 to $0.39 per sq ft, but rounded up to whole boxes this floor carries $0.43 per sq ft in flake. Keep the leftover sealed and dry for the next Riptide job.
For a cool accent instead of a full floor of chips, a heavy partial broadcast of Riptide over a gray base uses far less: each box stretches across 1,100 to 2,200 sq ft or so. Run your numbers in the flake calculator.
