Why Pavers Fail | 5 Reasons and How to Prevent Them

what's happening hardscapers today we're going to go through five reasons why pavers fail let's get into this so if you don't know me my name is Mike I own and operate a small hardscaping business in the Toronto greater Toronto area and I've been in business for five years been in the industry for about 15 now when I started with a supplier and on the side and even when I started my own business I started with fixing paver projects the paper projects that had settled sunk or just looked terrible and I would come in there and fix them so I've got a lot of different experience in seeing different reasons why paver projects fail these are definitely common things that do occur when it comes to the installation process but they can be prevented and they can definitely be fixed but some fixes are more expensive and more intricate than others so I'm going to get into the five reasons why pavers fail for this and to be honest a lot of this has to do with the base but we're going to break that down into several different factors Factor number one is the base material base material needs to be a properly specced out material that's approved icpi or the interlocking concrete Pavement in Institute has specific Aggregates that are approved for installation but there's also others that you can also use but you can never ever use stone dust stone dust will trap the water it doesn't allow for the drainage of that water so any water that hits that stone dust it won't drain through it it'll just stay there which causes all kinds of problems including efflorescence buildup on the surface of the pavers which is that white residue that you see that stains the pavers and that's caused because that water it just keeps those bricks saturated and when that water finally is able to evaporate it'll go through those pavers to the surface bringing salts with it and then those salts get deposited on the surface of those pavers so that's why you should definitely not use stone dust and there's still so many other reasons why not to use stone dust so if you want to watch my video on stone dust go to our Channel page and type in stone dust you'll definitely see one of our videos pop up there but there's a few methods that we like to use for our projects we like to use a traditional base which would be a three-quarter inch Stone down to fines this is like an a gravel or there's many different names to call this but ultimately it's that three-quarter inch angular crushed stone down to fines that's what makes up the majority of the base and then our bedding layer that final screeded layer that gets a nice smooth surface we use HPB or a quarter inch chip and this is a clean Stone it's clear that means there's no fines in it it's just that clean chip that we use to screed out for our bedding material and in fact we're always almost going to use that HPB as our bedding material it's just perfect for drainage it's perfect to work with it's an excellent excellent product and then the second base we're going to use is an open graded base so instead of that three quarter inch down to fines it's just going to be a clear three quarter inch material this allows water to go completely through it it's got void space and it's an excellent choice for a base product and in addition to that we're going to use a biaxial geogrid at some place in That Base material typically further down that base material than higher it stabilizes the material that you put on top of it so it just adds a little bit more stability in your base it's definitely definitely worth the investment and then our final base installation would be synthetic base this is using these polypropylene base panels they insulate the ground they spread out the load over a wider area they're excellent for those tight access situations where you can't get a machine into the backyard and then we can't forget the geotextile this goes at the bottom of your project this separates the base material from the subsoil so there's no contamination between the two and it's going to add some tensile strength also we install it on every single one of our projects and so many failed projects that I lifted up never had that geotextile installed with it so it's something that I stick with as well as all these different base material preparation methods that I went through there I can't tell you how many projects I lifted up that had stone dust or even worse which brings me to our second point and that's the base depth a lot of projects that I lifted up had inadequate base depth and that's important when it comes to creating a solid foundation for your project to sit on there's not much to talk about here really with this just have adequate base depth for the climate that you are in for example in Toronto we have multiple freeze thought Cycles every year in the winter so we want to make sure we have adequate drainage below our surface and that means having proper base depth which for us I do a minimum of six inches for patios to Max of eight inches typically and then for a driveway we're a minimum of 12 inches but more than likely going above that but even as equally important is making sure that you get all organic material out of that excavated area we did a project this year where we actually ran into a tree trunk and we need to get that completely removed because that will rot and that will settle down in the future so we want to get all organic material that includes soil that has lots of of organic content we want to get down to those structural subsoils those Clays those sand silty Sands whatever that might be that is the structural foundational soil in that area and then we go on to the next step after that excavation and getting down to our subsoils and we get to Point number three here and that is compaction poor compaction will lead to failure every single time so make sure you have the right compaction equipment available to you for your project as well as make sure that you have proper and adequate compaction of those materials this is a video all in of itself with this there's so many different things to get into but ensure that you're not just renting the smallest compactor from your local hardware store make sure that you're getting an adequate compactor for your project when it comes to compacting subsoil you want something that has a ramming action to it so a jumping jack or a rammer really helps with that but for more granular soils as well as the base material you can get away with a plate compactor preferably a reversible and preferably something that has at least four thousand pounds of centrifugal force or greater and the rule of thumb is for every one thousand pounds of centrifugal force that the compactor exerts that is the equivalent to one inch of material being compacted so 1000 for every one inch and you can't exceed that otherwise you're not going to get proper inadequate compaction Point number four is Edge restraint Edge restraint is another common failure what you'll typically see is the plastic Edge restraint popping out of the ground ultimately this could be due to it being installed too high what you need to do is actually scrape away that bedding material that one inch layer and then install the edger strain on top of your base material but it can still pop out over time with freeze thaw Cycles well we've gone ahead and done is actually installed a concrete toe along our pavers this works a lot better in terms of keeping that plastic edge of strain from popping up and we've had a lot of great success in installing that concrete so that's the way that we're gonna go get rid of that plastic registering at least in our own experience here another common thing that we'll see is actually those pavers on the edge slipping away from the patio and that's not actually due to the edge restraint that's more so the base because we should see because we should see an extension of that base past that final paver by the amount of the depths of the base so the base is six inches that base is going to extend past that final paver six inches this gives that final paver a great platform to sit on a great foundation and it's not going to slip away even a great installed Edge restraint is not going to prevent that and finally number five probably the most common failure that we'll see is the jointing compound and there's so many different reasons why this could be the case it could just be the jointed compound is just a typical sand and it's growing weeds out of it and insects getting all over it and wasn't sealed to be able to stabilize that sand jointing it could be poorly installed polymeric sand it could be just polymeric sand that it was installed properly but got hit with a rainstorm right after it there's many different and reasons for this jointing compound failure and we've actually got a video specifically about that because that's a lot to get into so if you want to learn more about jointed compounds best to go to our channel search jointing compounds you'll get more information there typically if it was installed poorly that's a step that was missed in a common step that's missed is the compaction of that jointed compound into the joints of those pavers that sets the pavers into the bedding material and it allows that sand to work its way all the way down to the bottom of those joints and that's incredibly important to the lock up or the interlocking of that interlocking concrete pavement and those are the five common reasons why pavers fail if you have any more that you'd like to add to this list leave it in the comment section below like this video if you found it helpful for whatever reason and definitely check out those other videos that we have on our Channel there that we talked about in this and subscribe to this YouTube channel for more hardscaping content like this thank you so much for watching

Channel: I Am a Hardscaper

Views: 54,304

Keywords: hardscape, hardscapes, hardscaping, hardscaper, hardscapers, installation, paver, pavers, paving stones, paving stone, contractor, contractors

Id: QXQxFSq-SRo

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023