Las Vegas is home to many pool decks, and far too often I have been called out to the “City of Sin” to test a pool deck that has caused slips and led to serious injuries to innocent vacationers. The pendulum dynamic coefficient of friction (DCOF) tester has been in use in over 50 nations now to assess the slip resistance of floors using over 50 years of international research. It can test a flooring’s slip potential using a hard rubber slider that simulates your average shoe sole, or a softer rubber slider that simulates bare feet, or softer shoe soles, such as those typically found on running shoes. For pool decks, you want to test using both types of rubber since you’ll always have people with bare feet walking around a pool deck, but you’ll also have people wearing shoes. Your pool deck needs to be slip resistant in both situations if you want to keep your insurance company and casino customers happy.
The BOT-3000E uses one type of rubber, and it’s a very hard rubber that does not in any way mimic bare feet. In fact, it’s SBR rubber is so hard that it often does not register that sharp grit (aluminum oxide, shark grip, or crushed bits of glass) has been added to a flooring surface. The hard rubber just runs across the tops of the sharp points that give bare feet excellent slip resistance on a wet pool deck and the BOT-3000E give erroneous results in these situations.
For example, at one large, famous casino in Las Vegas, a man was told to use an epoxy-type glossy beige paint to re-paint a pool deck. He painted a small section and got it wet and decided with his hands and feet that it was FAR too slippery when wet. He then called the manufacturer of the paint and they told him to NEVER apply this glossy paint around a pool without adding some grit to the paint. The manufacturer agreed that the paint was FAR too slippery when wet and that it wasn’t intended for areas that get wet in use unless some grit was added to the paint before application. The painter was sent some sharp aluminum oxide grit and was told to add 6.4 ounces per gallon, mix thoroughly, and then paint the pool deck with the grit added to the slippery, glossy paint. I was hired to come test the slippery paint on its own, the paint with the recommended amount of grit added to the paint, and then another test area where double the recommended amount of grit was added to the paint.
The City of Las Vegas had unfortunately fallen victim to the massive advertising campaign that the American tile industry (through their “Tile Council of North America”, or TCNA) had put forth telling people to use the BOT-3000E and either ANSI A137.1 or ANSI A326.3 (a newer version of the same test method) to determine if a floor was above the 0.42 DCOF safety threshold specified in those test methods as a “safe” floor. What a huge mistake! Page one of both test methods state that this test, “can provide a useful comparison of surfaces, but does not predict the likelihood a person will or will not slip on a hard surface flooring material.” The tests created for the BOT-3000E are not based on peer-reviewed international science or research into slip and fall accidents. The test methods were created by representatives of the tile industry to help them sell slippery tile. To use these tests as a “safety test” is to ignore the warning on page one of the test methods. Do so at your own peril!
The results using the BOT-3000E gave us the OPPOSITE of reality and the truth in this high-risk situation. On the smooth glossy paint that the painter and the paint manufacturer believed was far too slippery when wet, we got a test result of 0.56, which would mean this slippery paint should be just fine around a pool deck (an “Exterior, wet” area defined in the ANSI A326.3 test method). With 6.4 ounces of sharp aluminum oxide grit added to the paint, shown below, we got a test result using the BOT-3000E of 0.42 DCOF.
This means that as we made the floor more slip resistant with sharp grit added to the paint (as recommended by the paint manufacturer) we made the floor more slippery when wet?! What we were getting was false and misleading readings from the BOT-3000E. So then we tested the area that had been painted with double the dose of grit added to the glossy paint. This area felt very slip resistant and rough to our hands and feet and perfect for the pool deck. The BOT-3000E again gave us erroneous readings that we didn’t trust to be true. Below you can see the floor painted with double the recommended amount of grit, and the test result again using ANSI A326.3 was a 0.42 DCOF.
We then tested all three samples with the pendulum DCOF tester and ASTM E303-22 at my insistence, knowing that the pendulum is backed by 50 years of international research in over 50 nations. The painter was told by the City of Las Vegas that he needed to apply a paint to the floor that would achieve a minimum DCOF of 0.42 according to ANSI A1371.1, but the painter, the paint manufacturer and I all knew that if we applied the paint without the grit added, and we trusted the test results from the BOT-3000E, then we’d get people seriously injured and/or killed on day one of the pool opening! If we trusted the BOT-3000E, we would have applied the paint with no grit since that gave us the highest reading, and we’d be hearing from lawyers very quickly about injured customers and employees at this busy casino.
With the pendulum tester and test method ASTM E303-22, we got the truth. The slippery glossy paint on its own had a reading of 20 with hard rubber and 18 with soft rubber. Those readings fall into the “high slip potential” category. With 6.4 ounces of sharp grit added to the paint, we got readings of 34 with the hard rubber and 35 with the soft rubber. Those readings put the flooring into the “moderate slip potential” category. This means you might be able to get away with this floor around a pool, but since pool decks in Vegas have people who have been drinking alcohol and people who are spraying slippery sunscreen all over the deck, you’d be wise to choose a floor with a bit more slip resistance than that. With the double dose of sharp grit added to the slippery paint, we got pendulum test results of 45 with the hard rubber and 49 with the softer rubber. That put this floor in the “low slip potential” category with the pendulum test, and also put it above the recommended minimums suggested by the Australian pendulum test, which calls for a minimum pendulum test value (PTV, also sometimes called BPN for British Pendulum Number) of 45 using the hard rubber and a minimum of 40 using the soft rubber for a pool deck since it’s a “high-risk area” where a slip can cause a drowning or a very serious head injury on the edge of the pool.
For the man hired to paint the pool deck, the decision was easy. Don’t trust the BOT-3000E results. He needed to trust the pendulum ASTM E303-22 results. We generated a report for the City of Las Vegas saying that the painted flooring with double the amount of sharp grit added to the slippery paint met their requirement of 0.42 DCOF using ANSI A137.1. But we used the pendulum test results and its 50 years of research into real-world slip and fall accidents in over 50 nations to determine that in order to avoid slip and fall lawsuits, and to have peace of mind, he needed to install the paint with double the recommended amount of grit added. The last thing he wanted to do was create a slip hazard around this Vegas pool. We needed the pendulum tester to get the truth and to determine that more sharp grit indeed did make the slippery paint much less slippery.
Don’t be fooled by the advertising campaign produced by the American tile industry (through their TCNA and Walkway Management Group, or WMG) that you should trust data from the BOT-3000E and ANSI A326.3 as a “safety test”. If you do, you should get to know your lawyer well. You’ll be spending a whole lot of time together defending numerous slip and fall lawsuits! If you want a piece of paper saying your floor has “passed” a “safety test” created by the tile industry, get ANSI A326.3 done. If you want the truth based on 50 years of international science and research, you’ll need the ASTM E303-22 DCOF test done on your flooring BEFORE it’s installed. It’s best to have it tested again after a few days or weeks of maintenance and use, too.