Driveways fail in February. Not because February is harder on them than January, but because that is when the damage becomes obvious and the weather is finally settled enough to do something about it. Driveway repair waste is heavy, it is worth separating properly, and getting the skip size wrong on it is an expensive mistake. Our Leyland skip hire service sees a run of these every year at this point.
What the winter actually did
Water gets into a surface, freezes, expands and forces the material apart. Then it thaws, the water penetrates a little deeper, and the cycle repeats. Over a full winter that happens dozens of times, and each one makes the next one easier.
On tarmac it shows as cracking that widens into potholes, usually starting where the surface was already weak. On block paving it shows as blocks sitting proud, joints that have opened up, and edges that have crept outwards because the restraint has failed. On concrete it shows as cracks that were hairline in November and are now wide enough to see the sub-base through.
The common factor underneath all three is drainage. A driveway that sheds water quickly survives winters that destroy one that holds it. If your drive has been getting worse each year, the surface is the symptom and the base or the fall is usually the cause.
Patching or digging out
The honest answer is that patching a surface over a failed base buys you one winter, sometimes two. If the sub-base is sound and the damage is only superficial, a patch is fine and sensible. If the base has gone, patching is money spent on delaying the same job.
You can usually tell by lifting a small area. If what is underneath is well compacted stone, the base is doing its job. If it is soft, muddy or you can push a bar into it easily, it is not, and around Leyland the ground beneath a lot of older drives is exactly that.
Digging out properly changes the waste picture completely, because the sub-base is by far the heaviest part of the job.
Three materials worth keeping apart
Old tarmac is the first. It is worth separating because asphalt is fully recoverable, and planings from a lifted drive go back into use rather than being disposed of. Tarmac mixed into a general load loses that entirely.
Block paving is the second, and here the point is different. Blocks in reasonable condition have a value and a use. Plenty of people want reclaimed blocks for a path, an edging or a small area, and it is worth an advert before they go anywhere near a skip. If they are chipped, stained or a discontinued colour that will never be matched, then in they go.
Sub-base, sand and broken concrete are the third stream. This is clean inert material, it crushes down and it gets recovered, and our environmental and recycling page explains what happens to it once it reaches our site. Keep the geotextile membrane out of it, because plastic membrane through a load of stone is a nuisance to deal with.
The weight is the whole problem
This is where driveway jobs go wrong at the booking stage. A drive does not look like much waste when you are standing on it. Dug out to a proper depth, it produces a very large tonnage from a modest area.
Every material involved is dense. Compacted stone, sand, concrete and tarmac are all at the heavy end of what we carry, and a skip taking them reaches its legal limit while looking barely used. Our page on skip size versus weight limits sets out why the weight limit and the volume limit are separate constraints.
The counterintuitive answer is that bigger is usually wrong here. A 4 tonne midi skip exchanged two or three times moves more material than one oversized container that cannot legally be lifted once it is loaded. Our guide to choosing the right skip size covers the general principles, and for anything larger an 8 tonne builders skip is the next sensible step rather than jumping straight to a roll on roll off container.
Where the skip goes when the drive is the job
This is the practical wrinkle nobody thinks about until delivery day. The obvious place for the skip is the driveway, and the driveway is the thing being dug up.
Usually the answer is to stage it. Put the skip on the section you are doing last, work the rest, then move to the far side. Where that will not work, the skip goes on the road, which means a permit from Lancashire County Council as highway authority at £36 per month, and our guide on whether you need a permit to place a skip on the road in Lancashire explains the process.
Talk to us about the sequence before the first delivery. We would far rather plan the exchanges around your work than turn up to find the skip is in the way of the next section.
Local coverage
We work across this area constantly, running Penwortham skip hire and Bamber Bridge skip hire jobs alongside Leyland, and our drivers have a fair idea what a given estate will produce before they arrive.
Ring us on 01772 364399 with the rough area of the drive and whether you are digging out or resurfacing. Those two things decide the answer. Our contact page is there if you would rather send measurements over.
