Cicero Epoxy Flooring has spent more than 20 years on epoxy flooring in Northlake and the surrounding west suburbs, and the floors that now draw the most technical questions sit in rooms where water and electronics share a slab. Our work there is the same work we bring to a garage or a plant floor, done to a tighter standard around cooling equipment.

Every coating we install starts the same way. The slab is opened with a diamond grinder or a shot blaster to a measured concrete surface profile, because an acid etch leaves nothing reliable for a resin to grip. A moisture test is written into the scope before the price is settled, and the written proposal names the product line, the coat count and the finished thickness so a facility manager can check the floor against the quote.

What a coating cannot do matters as much as what it can. A seamless resin floor helps a leak stay visible and contained, but it is not leak detection and it is not a code-required containment system, so we design the floor to work alongside the detectors, drains and curbs the mechanical engineer specifies rather than in place of them.

Three Data Center Projects, One Floor Question

A curbed, coved containment floor around liquid cooling equipment in a Northlake data center.

Microsoft’s Container Building, 2009

Northlake’s data center history runs back to July 20, 2009, when Microsoft opened its Chicago data center at 601 Northwest Avenue. At about 700,000 square feet, it was the company’s first container data center, filling one floor with up to 220 shipping containers packed with servers. That building put large-scale computing on Northlake’s industrial land years before the current projects arrived.

We mention it as context, not as a credential. Microsoft is a neighbor on Northwest Avenue, not a customer of ours, and the same holds for every operator named on this page. What the building tells a contractor is that Northlake has hosted round-the-clock, mission-critical rooms for well over a decade.

Aligned on Northwest Avenue

Aligned announced on April 28, 2021 that it had broken ground on its Chicago hyperscale campus at 505 Northwest Avenue. The first building, ORD-01, was described at 220,000 square feet and 48 MW, expandable to about 60 MW, on an 18.5-acre campus planned for more than 100 MW. Mayor Jeffrey Sherwin called it Northlake’s third data center development.

ORD-01 runs Aligned’s Delta3 cooling system, which the company describes as using up to 85 percent less water than traditional cooling systems. The release does not say liquid reaches the racks, and we make no such claim. Cooling plants generally still move water or coolant through mechanical rooms somewhere in a building, and those rooms deserve a floor designed for containment.

T5 Chicago III on Grand Avenue

T5 Data Centers broke ground on September 24, 2024 on a three-story, 250,000-square-foot building at 11650 W. Grand Ave., known as T5 Chicago III. Reporting describes it with state-of-the-art air and liquid cooling systems and 36 megawatts of IT capacity, with completion expected in 2027. Corgan is the architect and Clune Construction the general contractor.

That makes T5 Chicago III the project in Northlake where liquid cooling is stated outright. It is still under construction, so floors around its cooling gear belong to the construction schedule rather than a retrofit. We include it because it shows where the city’s newest mission-critical space is heading.

Looking for epoxy-flooring closer to Evergreen Park? See Epoxy-Flooring Services in Evergreen Park.

When the Cooling Runs on Water

What Changes Near Coolant Distribution

Liquid cooling generally means coolant distribution units, supply and return piping, valves and manifolds sitting in or beside the rooms that hold the equipment. Every joint is a place a drip can start. On an ordinary concrete floor, that drip soaks into the slab, wicks along a joint or spreads under a cabinet where nobody sees it until the stain is wide.

That is why the floor question shifts once water comes toward the racks. Dust control and abrasion still matter, but the first requirement becomes a surface that does not absorb and does not hide. We treat this as general data-center practice; we have not seen any operator’s floor or cooling-loop specification for these Northlake buildings.

Piping Rooms and Mechanical Corridors

The rooms that carry chillers, pumps and coolant distribution piping are often the least finished spaces in a mission-critical building, yet they hold the most water. We coat them with 100% solids epoxy over a ground profile, typically in the ICRI CSP range the manufacturer calls for, and finish with a topcoat matched to the chemicals and cleaners the facility team actually uses.

A quartz aggregate broadcast can add texture where technicians walk with wet boots, though in rooms that are cleaned by mopping we keep the profile fine enough to rinse. Moisture in the slab itself is tested before anything goes down, using ASTM F2170 in-situ relative humidity probes, because a coating lifted by vapor from below fails exactly where it is supposed to hold water.

Phasing Around Equipment That Cannot Stop

In an operating building, cooling rarely goes offline for a floor crew. We phase the work room by room, often overnight or across weekends, with dust captured at the grinder by vacuum rather than swept or rinsed toward a drain. Resin selection also stays within the Illinois VOC limits for floor and industrial coatings, which bind the applicator as well as the product maker.

Cure is scheduled by slab temperature and the dew point spread at the surface, not by the calendar. A mechanical room held cold by its own equipment can sit closer to dew point than the office down the hall, and amine blush on a fresh epoxy coat is the price of ignoring that reading.

A Floor That Holds a Leak Where It Can Be Found

Seamless and Non-Absorbent

Leak containment on a floor starts with removing places for water to go. A troweled or self-leveling resin system has no grout lines and no open pores, so a spill sits on top as a visible film instead of disappearing into concrete. Control joints are filled with a compatible semi-rigid filler, and any joint expected to move is detailed so it does not crack open a path under the coating.

Color does part of the work too. A light, solid-color finish makes a fresh drip readable from the doorway, where a dark or busy vinyl flake broadcast can hide it for days. We usually recommend a plain field near cooling equipment and save texture for walkways.

Coves That Turn the Floor Up the Wall

An integral cove carries the resin from the floor several inches up the wall in one continuous piece, so water reaching the edge of a room meets a curved, sealed corner instead of a gap under base molding. We build coves with a trowel-grade mortar and a cove strip, then coat them with the floor so there is no seam at the turn.

Coves also matter at housekeeping pads, the raised concrete bases that many cooling units sit on. Wrapping the coating up and over each pad edge keeps water from a unit on a sealed surface, where it can be seen, rather than letting it track underneath and into the slab.

Curbs, Drains and Leak Detectors

Where a cooling loop is large, a curb around the equipment zone turns a room into a shallow basin. We form curbs in resin mortar and coat them continuously with the floor and coves, and we slope the field toward a floor drain when the engineer has located one. The drain body itself is sealed into the coating at its clamping collar so water cannot find the edge of the cut.

Leak detectors work best at the low point where water will actually gather, so we coordinate with the controls contractor before the floor is final. Sensing cable or spot detectors can run along the cove line or at the drain, on a surface that will not soak up the first ounces of a leak. The coating supports the detectors; it never replaces them.

Working Inside Northlake’s Schedule and Rules

Coordinating With Commissioning

On new construction, the floor goes down between trades. Coating before the coolant piping is hung risks damage from lifts and welding, while coating after it is filled means working around live water. We plan the slab cure, the moisture test and the coating window into the commissioning schedule so the floor is finished and inspected before the loop is charged.

New slabs carry a lot of water as they cure, and a fast-track schedule is exactly where a coating gets rushed onto concrete that is not ready. When probe readings come in high, we price a moisture-mitigation primer openly rather than gamble, and moisture is the first exclusion we explain in any coating warranty before the job is sold.

Registration With the City

Illinois has no state license for flooring or coatings contractors, so the local rules are the ones that count. The City of Northlake requires every contractor and subcontractor to register, with a $100 license good for one year from issuance, a $10,000 bond and a certificate of insurance naming the city. We confirm that registration before a job is booked.

Permit and code questions go to the City of Northlake Building Department, which administers the municipal building code. Fire-code questions for a commercial room are a different stop, because fire is not a city department here; we take coating and containment details to the Northlake Fire Protection District when a project calls for it.

Beyond the Data Center Floors

Northlake, a Leyden Township and Proviso Township city in Cook County known as The City of Friendly People, takes its name from North Avenue and Lake Street, which meet on its west border. Its industrial land is being redeveloped rather than added to, and the city counts data centers among that redevelopment.

The same discipline applies to the warehouses, shops and garages around those projects. We map cracks, spalls and old coatings before quoting, and we tell an owner plainly when a slab needs repair or replacement rather than a coat of resin. A floor that holds water well is a floor that was tested, profiled and built for the room it serves.