You Should Start Preparing for Winter

Since fall is here, winter is not far behind. As a result, you should start preparing for wintertime conditions as soon as possible. Some of the areas of particular concern are your paved surfaces, which can suffer enormous damage over the course of a winter if you have failed to provide them with the proper care and maintenance.

Why Is Winter Such a Huge Threat to Paved Surfaces?

There are a number of reasons that winter is such a huge threat to paved surfaces:

• Cracks, crevices, and other openings in your paved surfaces can let in water, which will freeze when wintertime conditions set in. Since water expands in the process of freezing into ice, this will widen the openings in your paved surfaces, thus worsening the existing damage while also making it even easier for them to suffer further damage from future repetitions. Something that will be particularly bad if you experience repeated incidences of rising and falling temperatures resulting in a freeze-thaw cycle.

• A lot of businesses like to use deicers to keep their pathways clear during the winter, which is important because customers won’t show up at their doors if they can’t even get to them. Unfortunately, while deicers should have minimal effect on the material of paved surfaces, the same can’t be said about the melting snow. Which is why you have to be careful about your use of deicers, especially because some of them have been known to cause serious environmental problems.

• Even if you have sealed your paved surfaces, you should know that they are not impervious to damage, and can be damaged by snow plows. The edges of snow plows will sometimes be made out of metal -rather than plastic- which are more than capable of cutting into your paved surfaces, if you are not as careful as you need to be. Interestingly, certain commercial snow plowing services are not prone to this particular problem, because they like to lift the edges of their plows a little bit above the ground.

• Water is hazardous to paved surfaces. Even if it is not locked into the freeze-thaw cycle. This is because water can react with the binding agent, causing it to lose its strength. Even worse, asphalt tends to absorb more sunlight, meaning that it has been known to melt winter build-up faster and trap more of the water.

What Can You Do?

You have a number of potential solutions to these problems. However, you should prioritize keeping your paved surfaces free from debris and other contaminants, while also making sure that they are sealed for proper precaution. If you need any assistance with your parking lot, please contact us. We offer skilled and reliable assistance with, so that you can focus your time and attention on projects more central to your business.