5 Ways To Maintain Your Asphalt Parking Lot

Once you’ve come to terms that your parking lot is also a crucial aspect of your commercial establishment, then the next step should take you on how you can prolong the life of your pavement. Maintaining general upkeep is the key to help extend the lifespan of your parking lot. Knowing what measures you should practice and following them should be able to aid you to keep your asphalt parking lot in good condition for at least 30 years.

Now, 30 years is quite a long time and that means more savings for you too if you’re able to keep your property in good standing. Now, to help you do that here are a few tips to keep in check.

Cleaning it regularly.

Even by simply sweeping your asphalt parking lot regularly of leaves, debris, rocks, dust, and dirt will help extend its life. For one, these are hazards that can potentially cause the  pedestrians or worse, your customers to trip and could also damage car tires. Moreover, these debris can pile up over time and clog your drainage. And if that happens, it could lead to water pooling some low-leveled surfaces of your pavement which would then get absorbed into the surface, penetrate the sub base and damage the asphalt in the process by softening it and consequently, creating cracks and potholes. We want to avoid going that route so ensure that you keep your pavement clean and free of obstructions.

Remove stains.

Oil is a common stain that plagues most driveways and parking lots. And while oil stains are hardly noticeable on a black asphalt parking lot, it can still considerably ruin your parking space by weakening and softening the surface until it eventually breaks down your asphalt’s structural integrity.

Our best advice is to remove stains while they’re still fresh otherwise, it’ll be much harder to scrub off later on. There are lots of guides out there on removing stains on asphalt surfaces and a few of the most common materials are baking soda, dish detergent, laundry detergent or even soda! No matter what product you choose to use, just always make sure that you remove the stain as soon as you see them.

Perform repairs as soon as you can.

Repairs are only effective when it’s not yet too late. For instance, filling in cracks and patching up holes should be done as soon as they appear so as to prevent further damage. In case, the top layer is too battered to even repair, you may want to opt for an asphalt overlay or repaving.

An asphalt overlay will strip off the deteriorate top layer of your asphalt surface and replace it with a fresh new layer of asphalt without actually removing the original foundation. An overlay will make your parking lot look brand new. This is the fix that you should be after if your base is still structurally sound despite the wrecked top layer.

Proper sealcoating.

Sealcoating is done only every 3 – 5 years. You don’t have to sealcoat your parking lot every year as it can only do more harm than good to your pavement. Sealing it every year would only result to the sealcoat cracking and peeling even more.

Proper sealcoating protects your parking lot of natural elements that can damage it such as UV rays, water, and debris. By putting up another line of defense, it will slow down the natural deterioration of your material and will thus, extend its life. Moreover, sealcoating it will help keep its shiny and polished appearance.

Perform annual inspections.

It’s easy to overlook the condition of your parking lot, especially when you’re busy tending to normal business operations. Hence, our advice is to schedule regular inspections. Every year, set some time to perform a general inspection of your property or establishment. Not only will this give you a more accurate assessment of your facilities, but it will also enable you to take care of pressing maintenance matters as early as possible and before it gets worse. And being able to prevent these things from spiraling even further down will save you lots of dollars down the road.

However, sometimes no matter how careful we are with our property if we made the mistake of hiring an incompetent contractor, then everything listed is here is all for naught because the most important part of any paving structure is to get a solid foundation and without that, your pavement is going to collapse or deteriorate that easily. To avoid having to suffer from a blow like that, make sure that you get the right paving contractor for your commercial parking lot paving needs and then follow general maintenance rules and you’ll be saving tons of cash from unnecessary repairs.