Fill the cracks before the first freeze

If I could make every owner in Northeast Ohio do one thing, it would not be resurfacing or sealcoating. It would be filling the cracks in October. It is the cheapest hour of maintenance a surface gets all year, and it is the one that decides whether the expensive work comes in five years or in ten.

What a crack does in winter

Picture a crack a quarter inch wide on the first of November. Rain fills it. The first hard night, the water freezes, and ice takes up about nine percent more room than water, so it pushes the sides of the crack apart. The thaw comes, the ice melts, the water drains deeper into the base and carries fines out with it. Then it freezes again. Around Cleveland that happens forty or fifty times between November and March, more in the snow belt east of the city. By April the quarter-inch crack is three-eighths, the edges are crumbling, there is a soft spot in the base under it, and the surface beside it has started to lift. Multiply by every crack on the court or the lot. That is the damage, and it all happens while nobody is looking.

Now picture the same crack filled on the fifteenth of October. The water runs over it. Nothing gets in. In April it is the same crack it was.

Why October

Three reasons, and they stack. The cracks are at their widest in cool weather, because the pavement has shrunk, so the filler goes in where it is needed and is squeezed, not stretched, when summer comes. The surface is dry and the days are still warm enough for the materials: hot-pour rubber on a lot needs a dry crack and air above about 40 degrees; acrylic fillers and membranes on a court want 50 and rising. And the leaves have not yet come down and hidden everything. September is fine. Early October is best. By November we are racing the first freeze, and some years we lose.

Courts and lots are different jobs

On a parking lot, the crack is cleaned with heat and compressed air, and hot-pour rubberized sealant, melted in a kettle, is poured flush or overbanded in a thin strip. It stays flexible well below zero, and a lot filled every autumn and sealed every three years lasts twice as long as one that is not. On a court, hot-pour is the wrong material: it shows through color and softens in the sun. Courts get acrylic crack filler on the hairlines and a fabric membrane over the working cracks, worked flush so nothing shows under the color. I explained the difference between filling and bridging in another article; it matters more on a court than anywhere.

What a fall visit includes

• A walk with chalk, marking every crack and every low spot, and a photo of each for your file.
• Cleaning and filling or bridging the cracks, by the method the surface wants.
• Clearing the drains and checking the swale, because a crack is only half the water problem.
• On a court, lowering or removing the nets and pulling the windscreens so the winter wind does not wreck the fence.
• On a lot, marking the curb stops and the catch basins so the plow driver can see them under snow.
• A one-page note of what we found and what next year will want.

What waiting costs

The crack-fill on a court or a lot is the smallest bill in the maintenance file. Skip it, and the same cracks in spring are wider, the filling costs more, and some of them have become repairs: a soft spot to cut out, a lifted edge to patch, a birdbath to level. Skip it for three winters and the court that would have resurfaced at year seven is resurfacing at year five, with membrane work on every crack. The arithmetic is not close. There is a reason the October call is the one I make to my own customers before they make it to me.