Asphalt crack sealing in Ottawa, the cheapest thing we do

What water does once it gets past the surface

An unsealed crack is an opening into the granular base, and in this climate that matters more than anything else you can do to a pavement. Water enters, saturates the granular and sits there. When it freezes, capillary action pulls more water toward the freezing front and ice lenses form perpendicular to heat flow, lifting whatever is above them. Then the thaw arrives, the meltwater cannot drain quickly, and the subgrade temporarily loses bearing capacity. That is why driveways and parking lots fail in March rather than in January, and why the first warm week after a hard winter is when the potholes appear. Every stage of that sequence depends on water being in the structure. Sealing a crack is the only intervention available that interrupts it at the start, before the base is involved at all. Nothing else on our list is that cheap or that decisive.

Why pavement fails in March

The sequence is worth understanding because it explains the timing everyone notices and nobody explains. Water enters through an unsealed crack and saturates the granular. As temperatures fall, capillary action draws more water toward the freezing front, and ice lenses form perpendicular to the direction of heat flow. Those lenses grow and lift the pavement above them. Then the thaw comes, meltwater cannot drain away quickly, and for a period the subgrade loses much of its bearing capacity while still carrying traffic. That is the moment pavement breaks. Not in January when everything is frozen solid and stable, but in March when it is thawing from the top down with nowhere for the water to go. It is the same reason spring load restrictions exist, typically early March to mid May at roughly 5 tonnes per axle under the Highway Traffic Act, set annually from a thaw index.

Crack sealing is the only work that keeps water out of the base

Everything that goes seriously wrong with asphalt in this climate starts with water reaching the granular underneath it. Frost damage needs three conditions at once: a frost-susceptible soil, sub-freezing temperature and available water. Ottawa supplies the first two whether anyone likes it or not.

That leaves water, and there is exactly one maintenance operation that addresses it directly. Sealing a crack closes the opening through which surface water enters the structure. Sealcoating changes the top few millimetres and the colour. Patching fixes damage that has already happened. Resurfacing replaces the wearing course. Only crack sealing stops the mechanism before it starts.

That is why it is both the cheapest work we do and the work with the best return. An Ottawa minor repair visit covering crack filling and sealing generally runs $200 to $500. Compare that against the cost of replacing a base that has been saturated for six winters and the arithmetic answers itself.

What the City's degradation fee says about asphalt crack sealing

Here is the argument that settles the maintenance-versus-replacement question, and it comes from the City's own fee schedule rather than from a contractor.

When someone cuts into City pavement, they pay a degradation fee scaled by how old that pavement is. Pavement three years old or less costs $61.70 per square metre. Pavement over twenty years old costs $17.70 per square metre. That is a 3.5 times difference, and it exists because cutting into good pavement destroys more remaining value than cutting into worn pavement does.

The City is assigning a hard dollar value to pavement condition. It has decided, in a published fee, that a surface in good condition is worth substantially more than the same surface late in its life. Every property owner faces the identical economics without a fee schedule to make it obvious. Keeping a surface in the condition where water stays out of the base is worth far more than the few hundred dollars it costs to do.

Any workmanship warranty is set out in your written quote, job by job. Call (343) 314-8525.