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Sealing Pitfalls
and How to Avoid Them
Sometimes a coat of sealer will pop back up just hours after you've put it down. Here's how to keep it in its place.
by Robert Spiegel
You can’t use sealer on wet concrete. Everybody knows that. But how do you know when the concrete is fully dry? “The concrete can look dry, but there could still be moisture on the inside,” says Bart Sacco, owner of Concrete Texturing Tool & Supply Inc. in Throop, Pa. “If that moisture on the inside leaks out, you have trouble later on.”
Sacco tells the story of a contractor who applied a solvent-based sealer on a pool deck.
When the contractor applied the sealer on the dry-appearing deck, it looked great. “Everything was good. The pool deck looked perfect,” says Sacco. But when the contractor came back from errands, the sealer had lifted off in sheets. “The whole deck peeled like saran wrap,” says Sacco.
Water is the bane of most sealing jobs. “Moisture is the paramount problem,” says Jim Glessner, owner of GST International, a sealer supplier in Reno, Nev. “There are a thousand reasons moisture causes problems. Often it’s lack of curing time.”
Glessner says a slab should sit for 30 days at 72 degrees or more and 50 percent humidity at most before applying sealer. |
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