如何进行查询比较cakephp 3.x上的浮点值？

I'm new to cakephp and I'm trying to do a search area to list some products that have their prices greater than a value, or lower than a value, and paginate it.

But when I try to do so, the result is totally different from what I've expected. When trying to get to know why was this happening, I had found out that my query was treating the value as String type instead of a Float, and it was messing up with the results.

No matter what I try, the type of value doesn't change, how do I make to change the type of the value on the query of cakePHP?

// the price value that comes from the input is formatted like this: '1.000,00'

$productsModel = $this->loadModel('Products');

$this->paginate = [
    'contain' => [
       'Archives', 'Categories', 'Favorites'
    ],
    'conditions' => [
        //here I've tried to do some conversions manually
        'Products.price >=' => floatVal(str_replace(",", ".", str_replace(".", "", $data['lower_price']))),
        'Products.price <=' => floatVal(str_replace(",", ".", str_replace(".", "", $data['greater_price']))
    ],
    'limit' => 16
];
$products = $this->paginate($productsModel);

$this->set(compact('products'));

I was expecting that the query was generated like this:

SELECT * FROM products WHERE price >= 29.90;

But I have this instead:

SELECT * FROM products WHERE price >= '29.90';