Sealcoating
Can I sealcoat my own driveway?
Yes, and what decides whether it holds up is not the coat itself but the cracks and the cleaning that happen before it.
The numbers
- Store sealer comes in five gallon pails, and the label gives both the coverage and the weather it needs.
- Asphalt emulsion sealer normally asks for 50 degrees and rising, and 24 dry hours after.
- Pourable cold crack filler sits on top of a crack. Hot rubber melts into both walls of it.
- Sealer over an unwashed surface peels, because nothing bonds to dirt.
What a homeowner can do well
A clean, sound, two car driveway is a real weekend job. Sweep it, wash it, let it dry all the way through, cut the edges in with a brush and pull the rest with a squeegee. Read the pail for the temperature and the dry time and take both seriously, because they are the two things people skip.
Where the store product runs out
The gap is the crack work. Pourable filler out of a jug sits in the top of a crack, shrinks as it cures, and lifts out in strips after one Wisconsin winter. Hot rubber goes in at around 400 degrees, which is thin enough to reach the bottom and hot enough to melt into the asphalt on both sides, and it needs a melter to do it.
So the split is this: the coat is a job you can do, and the cracks are the part where the equipment changes the outcome. A drive with few cracks is a good candidate. A drive with cracking all over is not.
What it does not fix
If an area gives under your foot, or a section has broken into squares, sealer from any source is the wrong purchase. Those are base failures and they get cut out and rebuilt.