January 5, 2022
3 mins read
6 Tips to Maintain Parking Lot Asphalt Pavements
A regular inspection is essential for maintaining the durability and longevity of the parking lot asphalt quality. Natural occurrences involving heat, moisture or heavy traffic might erode the surface and damage the infrastructure of the pavements. To avoid such disintegration, regular maintenance should be facilitated. Here are a few textbook tips for maintaining your commercial asphalt parking lot:
Inspect Your Commercial Asphalt Parking Lot Regularly
The quality of parking lot asphalt begins deteriorating with time. Hence, knowledge of maintaining your commercial asphalt parking lot might come in handy with numerous load vehicles and heavy traffic loosening their foundation regularly. Frequent check-ups and maintenance of roads improves their longevity and prolong any damage occurring to the parking lot asphalt.
Seal Coating
Often, parking lot asphalt produces visible cracks due to ultraviolet rays, oxidation or water penetration. Crack Sealing is a significant covering applied to prevent any further wear and tear to your pavement. Seal coating, when applied on the surfaces of the parking lot asphalt, extends the life of the pavement by prohibiting any water seepage. It also provides skid resistance and an anti-glare surface during wet weather conditions. Moreover, it makes the gravel sturdy and dust-free.
Crack Filling
Cracks are born out of declining surface quality or base or due to poor drainage issues. Additionally, due to the temperature change, commercial asphalt parking lot’s experience expansion or contractions that lead to various cracks, such as alligator or edge cracks, damaging the pavement. To evade such issues, experts advise filling the cracks in the pavement every few years. When done properly, the durability of the asphalt increases greatly.
Pothole Filling
When you neglect the alligator cracks, water easily seeps into them. This then results in a greater depression on the pavement and commercial asphalt parking lot comes loose with vehicles driving over them constantly. Moreover, potholes can also be an aftermath of the constant cycle of ice thawing and freezing. Preparation of the right mixture followed by filling the potholes must be done from time to time.
Avoiding Heavy Loads
Asphalts come with their own limiting capacities and weight tolerance. When the quality of the pavement is below the benchmark, it is advised not to let any heavy vehicles or carriers pass over it, which can result in further damage to the asphalt. Commonly, parking lot designs are built in accordance with their capacity to tolerate a certain weight and in such cases, heavy vehicles might not be permitted to park, so as to maintain the quality of the asphalt. This avoids the cost of maintenance and increases the longevity of the pavement.
Removing Accumulated Snow and Ice
The freezing and thawing of snow over the pavement results in commercial parking lot asphalt cracks and damage. This snow trickles through even the narrowest of the gaps in the pavement and the constant freezing and thawing widen these cracks. Eventually, these cracks become broader and spread through parking lot asphalt. Hence a regular removal of snow should be practiced.
Parking lot asphalt maintenance is definitely not an easy job and requires experienced Facility Managers and quality equipment. That’s exactly what GRM Inc. brings to you, along with our quality services and in-depth field knowledge to fix every issue – right from property maintenance to snow and ice management. We do it all!