Clean and seal services are one way to ensure your commercial structure always looks its best. Whether it’s a high-rise corporate headquarters, historic structure, or multi-family complex, we believe every commercial building should look as good as the day it was built.
Commercial Clean and Seal Services
Concrete, brick, and stone building facades need regular maintenance to keep them looking great. As the nation’s premier provider of commercial clean and seal services, Presto Restoration has serviced countless commercial properties all over the country.
Each clean and seal project we do is tailored to the specific needs of the property and the goals of the building owner and/or manager. Before making clean and seal recommendations, we thoroughly assess the building by:
- Looking at the type of material the building is constructed from.
- Determining whether the sealing process is more geared towards aesthetics or waterproofing needs.
- Viewing the building as a whole.
- We provide pricing to the client so owners and managers can budget the service.
- When the project is ready to move forward, we conduct in-depth testing on the building’s materials to determine the best process for restoration.
- We then provide as needed submittals to any architects or material manufacturers and present a thorough plan of service to the client.
Only then do we make a proposal as to which approach will improve the appearance of your building and protect your investment.
Cleaning the Building’s Exterior
Most of our clients call us for exterior commercial clean and seal services for one or more of these reasons:
- Water mitigation through the walls.
- Exterior stains caused by biological and/or environmental contamination.
- Suboptimal curb appeal.
No matter what the reason is for the clean and seal, the first step is to thoroughly clean the substrate so that the water repellant seal has maximum adhesion. This step also prevents future damage from deep penetrative staining and/or future cleaning services.
Each time a building’s substrate is cleaned with chemicals or high pressure, some of the substrates is sacrificed during the procedure. Some exterior stone cleaning methods, such as bleach-based cleaning, produce minimal changes to stone-based building components. Other methods, such as cleaning with acidic cleaner or high pressure, remove quite a bit of surface material. In some cases, when the building’s exterior has not been cleaned for an extended period of time, stains make their way deep into the stone’s pores. To get a nice clean appearance, this often requires significant chemical treatment.
A final consideration when deciding which commercial clean and seal services to use is the actual building material. Limestone, for instance, is an extremely soft material that requires special chemical treatment. If it were to be high-pressure washed, irreversible damage to the stone’s surface would occur. Marble and granite are also highly sensitive to the many types of acids commonly used to clean commercial stone façades.
Sealing the Building’s Surface
Now that we’ve covered the cleaning stage of our clean and seal services, let’s talk about the sealing process.
Generally, Presto provides sealing services to buildings long after the construction process and typically after the material has been through several clean and seal cycles. The industry standard is to clean and seal a building about every 10 years, although some areas of the country do it less frequently.
What this means is that when we’re called in for clean and seal services, the building has usually already been sealed with a silane (inorganic compound) or siloxane (silicone-based coating) in the past. These materials are deep within the stone and serve to waterproof the interior components of the panels. At the surface level, however, they both tend to degrade within a year or less due to UV exposure. This results in loss of surface-level protection.
Surface level protection is important because it helps prevent biological growth on the stone and keeps environmental contaminants from adhering to the building’s façade. As a rule, we recommend silicone-based sealers that provide outstanding surface-level protection for about 10 years.
The Highest Standards of Building Restoration
No matter which product building owners and managers choose to clean and seal their stone, brick, or block facades, Presto recommends exercising extreme caution to ensure window systems are not damaged during the process. We’ve been called in far too many times when other clean and seal service providers end up damaging windows due to acidic cleaners or sealer overspray into the window systems.
To avoid having this happen during our clean and seal process, we almost always include window cleaning in our services. This way, the condition of the glass can be examined after the clean and seal services to ensure there’s no lingering overspray or damage. We believe this is a good policy despite the fact that the cleaning chemicals and sealers we recommend do not present a danger to window systems. Our goal is to leave the job fully complete with an exterior that really shines!
Presto’s clean and seal services are of the highest standard. We promise to:
- Make sure you get the right products and processes to clean the stone.
- Select a sealer that meets the long-term needs of your building’s façade.
- Do no harm while performing the clean and seal services.
Clean and Seal Services Done by a Professional
Our years of experience have taught us that if your commercial clean and seal services meet these three key criteria, they’ll be sustainable and successful for the overall goals of your property. You can read about a recently completed historic building restoration project that included cleaning and sealing and many other projects on our portfolio page.
If you are looking for clean and seal services for your commercial or historic building, we would love to learn more about your project.
Contact Presto Restoration for a free consultation today.
Call us at 1-800-785-9927 or Request A Quote.
