ESD Flooring in Saudi Arabia: Standards, Resistance and Testing

ESD flooring in Saudi Arabia is resinous or resilient flooring specified to carry static charge to ground within a defined electrical resistance range. Its performance is set by an ESD control programme — usually ANSI/ESD S20.20 or IEC 61340-5-1 — and verified by resistance testing on the finished floor, not by the product name.

What is ESD flooring, and what does it actually control?

ESD flooring in Saudi Arabia is flooring engineered to carry electrostatic charge from a person or an object to earth at a controlled rate. It is not a coating with a static-sounding name. The conductive path runs through the finish, into a conductive primer, into a grounding network, and out to the building earth. Break any link in that chain and the floor is decorative.

Two failure modes matter. The first is the discharge event itself: a charged person touching a sensitive device and destroying or latently damaging it. The second is charge accumulation on a walking operator, which is why body-voltage generation is measured separately from floor resistance.

The critical point for specifiers is that a floor cannot be compliant on its own. ANSI/ESD S20.20 treats the person, the footwear and the floor as one system, and requires the combined resistance of that system to sit below 3.5 × 10⁷ ohms. A floor tested at the right value while operators wear ordinary rubber-soled shoes still fails the system requirement. Footwear policy is part of the flooring specification, and it should appear in the same document.

Which standards govern ESD flooring specification

Two documents dominate. ANSI/ESD S20.20 sets requirements for an ESD control programme, including the flooring/footwear system. IEC 61340-5-1 is its international counterpart and is harmonised with S20.20, though the exact numeric alignment between the two documents should be confirmed against the current editions rather than assumed — we do not restate IEC threshold values here because we have not verified them against the published text.

Test methods sit underneath the programme standards. ESD S7.1 is the method for measuring the resistance of flooring materials, and it is the reference cited for the Stonlux ESD system’s surface resistance. ESD STM97.2 measures body voltage generation on a walking person, which is how the sub-100-volt figure for that system is derived. ASTM F150 is the companion method for electrical resistance of conductive and static-dissipative resilient flooring; it prescribes how to measure, not what value to pass at — the pass/fail threshold comes from your programme.

Within S20.20 the two named ranges are these:

• Conductive: 2.5 × 10⁴ to 1.0 × 10⁶ ohms
• Static dissipative: 1.0 × 10⁶ to 1.0 × 10⁹ ohms

Neither is automatically correct. The target range comes from the owner’s ESD control programme or the consultant’s specification, and that is who should nominate it.

Conductive vs static dissipative: how to choose

Conductive flooring drains charge faster. That is an advantage where devices are highly sensitive and a disadvantage where an operator may contact live equipment, because a lower-resistance path also means less resistance protecting the person. Dissipative flooring bleeds charge more slowly and is the common default in mixed environments.

In practice the decision is rarely the flooring contractor’s. It belongs to the ESD coordinator or the design consultant, and it should be recorded with the reason. We have walked onto more than one fit-out in Riyadh where the tender said “anti-static epoxy” and nothing else, and the value the client actually needed was two decades away from what was ordered.

System build-up: what a conductive epoxy floor is made of

Take Stonhard Stonlux ESD as a worked example. SolidDrops is an authorised distributor of Stonhard systems in Saudi Arabia, and this is one option among several — the build-up logic is the same across manufacturers.

The system is a three-component, pigmented, liquid-rich, self-levelling conductive epoxy applied at 2–3 mm. Beneath it sits the primer, and the primer selection is the electrical design decision. ATK Primer gives the conductive route with surface resistance below 1.0 megohm when tested to ESD S7.1. ATM Primer gives the static-dissipative route. SL Primer handles substrate preparation where the electrical function sits elsewhere in the build-up.

Between primer and topping runs the grounding network: copper tape laid in a grid across the floor area and terminated at grounding points bonded to the building earth. Grid spacing and the number of grounding points are set by the system design and the floor geometry, and they should be shown on a drawing rather than decided by the applicator on the day.

The measured performance of the finished system for Stonlux ESD includes body voltage generation below 100 volts per ESD STM97.2. That figure describes a walking operator on the installed floor and is a different measurement from surface resistance. Both belong in the handover file.

How an ESD floor is installed and tested on site

Substrate first. Concrete must be sound, clean, dry and mechanically prepared — usually shot-blasted — with all laitance removed. Moisture testing is not optional; trapped moisture behind an epoxy film in a Jeddah building with a slab-on-grade is one of the most common causes of failure we are asked to investigate.

Installation runs to a controlled temperature window of 16–30 °C for the Stonlux system. That is a real constraint on a Saudi project. A shell building in Dammam in July with no permanent HVAC is outside the window during the working day, and the answer is temporary conditioning, not optimism.

Copper tape is laid and continuity-checked before the topping goes down. Once the tape is buried, a break is expensive to find. The self-levelling topping is applied at the specified thickness, and the floor cures. For Stonlux ESD at 25 °C, return to service is 48 hours for light traffic and 72 hours for normal operations — figures worth putting into the programme early, because a live data hall handover measured in hours will not accommodate them.

Verification closes the loop: resistance testing to ESD S7.1 at defined grid points, recorded with the test instrument, the electrode arrangement, the ambient conditions and the location of each reading. The test point locations should be agreed before installation, not chosen afterwards to suit the result.

Where ESD flooring is specified across the Kingdom

The clearest driver is data centre construction. Saudi Arabia’s data centre market was valued at USD 2.91 billion in 2026, up from USD 2.43 billion in 2025, and is projected to reach USD 8.85 billion by 2034 at a CAGR of 14.93% over 2026–2034. Every one of those halls has technical floor area where static control is part of the design brief.

SolidDrops supplies and installs ESD and conductive flooring across Jeddah, Riyadh, Dammam, Jubail, Makkah, Medina and Tabuk. Requirements differ by sector: an electronics plant in Jubail and a pharmaceutical suite in Riyadh may both ask for أرضيات مضادة للكهرباء الساكنة, and mean different resistance ranges by it.

Cost factors and the mistakes that cause retests

We publish no rates, because an ESD floor is priced against a specification and a substrate, not a square metre. The variables that move the figure:

• Target resistance range — conductive routes carry different primer and grounding cost than dissipative.
• Substrate condition — repair, levelling and moisture mitigation before any resin is opened.
• Grounding network extent — copper tape grid density and number of bonded grounding points.
• Area geometry — many small rooms cost more per square metre than one open hall.
• Programme constraints — the 48/72 hour cure window against the client’s occupancy date.
• Temporary conditioning — maintaining 16–30 °C in an unconditioned shell.
• Testing and documentation — witnessed resistance testing and the handover record.

The recurring mistakes are consistent. Specifying “ESD epoxy” without a resistance range. Omitting footwear from the specification and failing the system test at 3.5 × 10⁷ ohms. Cleaning the finished floor with a polish or a residue-leaving detergent, which insulates the surface and shifts readings by orders of magnitude. And skipping the pre-topping continuity check on the copper tape. For a quotation, send the specification and the substrate details.

What this means for projects in Saudi Arabia

Three climate factors change how these floors behave here. Low relative humidity in inland cities raises charge generation on operators, which makes the flooring/footwear system more critical rather than less — a floor that reads acceptably will not compensate for dry-air charging if footwear is uncontrolled. Coastal humidity in Jeddah and the Eastern Province cuts the other way, and brings substrate moisture risk with it.

Heat is the installation constraint. The 16–30 °C application window and the 25 °C reference for return-to-service timing are not advisory. Slab temperature lags air temperature, so a slab that absorbed heat all week will still be above the window on a cooled morning. Measure the slab, not the room.

Dust is the maintenance constraint. Fine airborne dust settles on any resin floor, and the cleaning regime chosen to deal with it decides whether the floor still meets its resistance range in year three. Specify the cleaning chemicals alongside the floor, and retest periodically to a schedule set by the ESD control programme.

Finally, the resistance range, grounding method and test point locations should be defined by the consultant, the owner’s standard or the ESD control programme — not left to the flooring contractor. Where that decision has not been made, the honest answer at tender stage is to flag it rather than assume a value.

Who supplies and installs ESD flooring in Saudi Arabia

SolidDrops supplies and installs ESD, conductive and static-dissipative flooring across Saudi Arabia. As an authorised distributor of Stonhard systems in Saudi Arabia we can specify Stonhard Stonlux ESD where a self-levelling conductive epoxy suits the brief, and alternative resin or vinyl systems where it does not.

Our scope covers substrate survey and moisture testing, system selection against the stated resistance range, grounding network design and installation, application, and witnessed resistance testing to ESD S7.1 with a documented handover record. For existing facilities we also carry out resistance surveys on installed floors, which is often how a client discovers that a cleaning product change moved the readings.

For related detail see our pages on ESD epoxy flooring for data centres and vinyl versus epoxy ESD flooring. Send the specification to [email protected] or call +966 50 213 1112.

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