Brick Paver Restoration is a major part of our business. The restoration of brick pavers covers a broad span of services, stripping off failed paver sealant, calcium removal, oil stain removal, rust/irrigation, rust/fertilizer rust removal, efflorescence removal, and color restoration.
Stripping
Paver Sealant is needed when an inexperienced contractor or overzealous employee is in a rush or doesn’t fully understand how to properly clean and seal pavers
Most often, a homeowner, handyman, or even a paver installer uses a cheap or low-quality paver sealant. Often we find ourselves removing solvent/oil/Xylene/acrylic-based paver sealants. These are all different names for the same product. How could 1 product have multiple names? A solvent simply means “to dissolve”. A solvent is a very toxic paver sealer often composed of Xylene for the brick paver application. It is an acrylic type of sealant. Often, acrylics are referred to as oils.
Homeowners will hear that a contractor used a solvent-based sealant on their pavers and it turned white, and the contractor will then say “Oh, well we use a Xylene-based or an oil-based sealer” in hopes to make the uneducated homeowner think it’s a different product. These types of sealants are actually great sealers up north. But here in our service area in the Tampa Bay area of Florida, there is too much moisture in the ground for these paver sealants to have a positive outcome. Draw a line from Marion County to Daytona. Everything south of that line falls under Florida’s humid subtropical climate category. What happens is the moisture we have in the ground (in some parts of Sumter, Lake, Citrus, and Hernando County there are raging rivers and springs flowing just 8’ below the ground even) which permeates through the ground soil, through aggregate paver base material and into the porous brick pavers, which then gets trapped between the paver and the thin top layer coating of those solvent-based sealants we just talked about, not allowing them to breathe – creating a white hazy look.
Stripping can also be effective when you have an installer who previously sealed in the dirt, contaminants as well as over sanded or for incorrect sanded joints, our standard cleaning will remove any dirt, mildew, or contaminants unless it is under your current sealer, at that point stripping may be needed.
Solvent-based brick paver sealants have to be applied when the brick pavers are COMPLETELY DRY – free of ANY moisture now or in the immediate future. As just mentioned in the paragraph above, there’s just too much moisture in our ground in this region of Florida to have the ideal paver sealing conditions 8 out of 12 months of the year here in Florida. These sealants will begin to turn a hazy white color (often within the first 3 months or the first few rainfalls, if not sooner) and in some extreme cases, even looks like someone spilled caulk or white glue into the joints and all over the surface of your once beautiful Brick Pavers!
You have a few options, there is really only 1 option that is your best and most cost-effective #3:
1. Replace the entire driveway at an extremely high cost
2. Live with ugly pavers and let it hopefully wear off in about 7-9 years.
3. Best and most cost-effective option: Give us a call for a free estimate to have the failed paver sealer stripped off the surface and re-sealed the correct way.