ESD Floor Testing Services

STM7.1-2020 acceptance testing measures the installed floor’s resistance to ground and point to point, with a minimum number of tests for each. Conductive floors are specified below 1.0 × 10⁶ ohms and static dissipative floors at or above 1.0 × 10⁶ and below 1.0 × 10⁹ ohms. Which range your program requires is a selection question, answered on our conductive vs dissipative page, not a testing question.

What testing establishes is whether the floor still sits inside the range your S20.20 program specifies, point by point, with drift visible in the data before it becomes an audit finding. A floor can pass on average and fail at the points nearest a corroded ground strap, which is why mapped readings matter more than an average.

Floor resistance alone does not prove the system works with people on it. STM97.1 measures resistance through the full person–footwear–floor path, and STM97.2 measures the body voltage a person generates walking on the floor. S20.20-2021 requires a footwear/flooring system used for personnel grounding to stay below 100 volts and below 1.0 × 10⁹ ohms system resistance (qualification limits), and a passing floor paired with the wrong footwear can still fail.

When the scope includes these tests, we run them with the footwear your program specifies, so a failed reading points at the actual fault instead of restarting the footwear-versus-floor argument from zero.

Every reading is tied to a numbered location on your floor plan, so the next verification cycle measures the same points and drift becomes a trend line instead of an anecdote. Meter calibration certificates travel with the data, and the technician who took the readings signs the record. The assembled package is built for the binder an auditor actually opens: the numbered readings, the floor plan, calibration records, and the pass/fail disposition.

A floor can hold its material resistance and still fail verification because the path to ground is broken. Strap corrosion or a tie-in severed during another trade’s work reads the same way in the data: points near the fault spike while the rest of the floor passes. We trace faults to the physical strap or tie-in rather than reporting a bare number, because a grounding repair is a much smaller scope than a recoat.

Forklift lanes and cart paths thin the conductive topcoat well before the field of the floor shows wear. Resistance in the lanes drifts upward while everything else passes, and a whole-floor average hides it. Mapped readings catch lane drift early enough that a lane recoat, rather than full replacement, is still on the table. Once wear reaches the ground plane, the conversation changes, and we will tell you which side of that line your floor is on.

We test floors installed by Craftsman and by other contractors. Verifying an installed ESD floor against an S20.20 program does not require the original installer. Testing a floor with no baseline data starts by establishing the test-point map and a baseline set of readings; every visit after that measures drift against it.

If the floor’s test records lapsed or were never formalized, the same visit produces its compliance verification record, current as of the test date. Product qualification records for each footwear/flooring combination are a separate S20.20-2021 requirement (footwear/flooring qualification).

When ESD flooring auditors or a customer’s quality team schedule a program review, the floor section of the binder either exists or it does not. Our closeout package is built to be that section. Mapped STM7.1 readings referenced to floor-plan locations, STM97.1 and STM97.2 results with the footwear pairing recorded (when those tests are in scope), meter calibration certificates, and technician sign-off arrive assembled, not as raw data your team has to format the week before the audit.

A failed reading is the start of a diagnosis, and many failures never reach replacement. Grounding faults resolve at the strap or tie-in. Wear failures scale from a lane recoat up to full replacement, with pricing that depends on system type, thickness, and substrate condition (ESD flooring cost). Because our in-house ESD flooring installation crews perform the corrective work themselves, the test data feeds the repair scope directly. Replacement options and system selection live on our ESD flooring hub.