Seal Coating Care
Residential and Commercial Seal Coating Care
Seal coating care is essential to preserve your new driveway, you may want to seal coat it after it has been paved. The best time to seal is 4-12 months after it has been paved, and every 4-5 years thereafter. It can help waterproof and prevent cracks, which can worsen over time.
Asphalt is also softened and broken up by gasoline, oil, grease, road salts, and anti-freeze, which drips from cars. Sealer protects new asphalt with a coating that is impervious to these harmful elements. With older asphalt driveways, sealer is mostly a cosmetic procedure.
This will NOT fix every little thing, nor will your driveway look brand new. Once a driveway is already damaged, seal coating will not hide major flaws, but will certainly improve the curb appeal of your home.
What to Expect with Seal Coating Care
When you begin using your driveway after sealing, you will notice for the first few weeks to a month that it appears to be marking from the wheels of your car; this is to be expected.
What’s happening is that the sand in our sealant mix is loosening at the very top of the coating. This will blend in within weeks.
NOTE: We ask that you do not do any extreme wheel turning for the few weeks after the sealer has been applied.
Try not to turn your wheels in one place when not moving. This can result in what we call power steering marks.
Edges
The majority of the sealer will be sprayed on, as this produces an even coat with no lines. However, areas near walls, cobblestones, fences, and walkways will be hand-painted to avoid getting sealer on these areas. Please note that you may notice a difference in the way each was applied, but these areas will blend in a few weeks.
Drying Time
To help with seal coating care, we ask that you allow at least 12-48 hours of drying time, and out of those 12-48 hours, 6 hours be in the sunlight. If your driveway receives a lot of sun during the day, it could be dry in as little as 2 hours. If not, or if it happens to be humid, you will want to allow the full 48 hours (or longer) before walking/driving on it. Very shady areas may take even longer.
Sprinklers
Please make sure your sprinkler system is turned OFF 24 hours priors to sealing and 48 hours after sealing. Otherwise, it will wash away the sealer.
Cracks
We may have filled cracks on your driveway before applying the sealer. The material used is a rubberized crack sealer. This crack filler may NOT be smooth or flush to the asphalt, and may sink a bit due to the make-up of the rubberized material. This is normal. In some instances, the sealer can come off this rubber because it is not as solid as asphalt.
The rubber is there to protect your asphalt. If cracks are LESS than 1/4” wide, we can NOT fill them with crack filler. They are too small to do so and therefore you may still notice them. We can not fill fine, spider-cracks or tree root/severely heaved cracks with hot rubber.
Oil Stains
All gas, oil and chemical spots will be pre-treated. But, we can not guarantee their removal or coverage. If they are severe, they may continue to be a problem and show through the sealer. We treat these areas with the best materials available to us, and they work quite well, but they do have limits.
Seal Coating Care for Your Property
If you are interested in learning more about seal coating care, get in touch with Reading Asphalt Corp today by calling 781-944-7072.
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My wife and I are THRILLED with the new driveway installed by Reading Asphalt. Every step of the project was done with professionalism, on time, to budget, with quality workmanship, and responsive to the minor changes we requested. Tony met me on my schedule and provided a very competitive and timely quote. All email communications I had with Shannon were excellent and we kept each other apprised of their and my schedules. The Reading Asphalt team arrive on time, worked as a true team, communicated what they were doing and when the next team would arrive to complete the job. I highly recommend Reading Asphalt for any of your residential paving needs.
R Morey – Google Review
Why Choose Reading Asphalt Corp.?
- Over 70 years of creative design experience, working with landscape architects and engineers.
- We pave about 500 new driveways per year, more than any other local company.
- We use the most modern equipment for every paving application.
- We pave our driveways thick, built to last 20-30 years.
- We’ve been servicing Reading residents for over 70 years.
- We get the job done quickly.