My lower driveway has a small sinkhole. It isn’t deep enough to swallow a car, but it does need a new top patch every few years. When my neighbor and I poured the concrete for its most recent patch, we added two containers of charcoal cement color to the mix. Three would have been better (see photo).
I first mentioned the sinkhole in 2011 in a post titled The Little Pour. I speculated on what might be causing it and wrote about the action I took at the time. Since then, the ground below one small area of the driveway has continued to slowly sink, causing the patches I have made to eventually crack and sink with it.
I have tried using concrete and cold asphalt as patching products. The latter more closely resembles the driveway surface, but it doesn’t last as long as concrete before cracking. (That’s with my sinkhole, not a general comment.) Concrete is reliable and easy enough to work with, but it looks like, well, concrete when you are done. Several brands of blacktop sealers can be applied over the concrete after it cures that make it roughly the same color as the driveway, but the sealers don’t last. They wear off and wash away after a wet winter.
This time, I tried a powdered tinting product made by Sakrete to give the concrete a, hopefully, driveway-matching color that will last a long time. The stuff is pricey—one container is about $10 and only tints 80 pounds of concrete. I bought two containers of it. To work with the tint powder, you mix it with water and then add the water to the dry concrete mix. That disperses the color uniformly through the concrete batch.
The concrete took on a decorative charcoal color as advertised, but the problem was that we underestimated the number of bags of concrete needed for the job. That’s a common mistake. Partway through the pour, we had to make a concrete run for two more 60-pound bags to add to the three bags already mixed. Thus, the two containers of Sakrete cement color got mixed with 300 pounds of concrete instead of the max of 160 pounds Sakrete recommended. As the photo shows, the end result is lighter in color than ideal. However, it looks better than a plain off-white concrete patch in my view.
I can blame this partly on Home Depot. They were sold out of the charcoal cement color when I went back to purchase the two additional bags of concrete. But once you start pouring concrete, you can’t stop partway through to wait for more materials like you might do with a painting project. That’s why the color of the patch turned out the shade it did.
To be clear though, not estimating the job accurately and getting ALL of the materials beforehand is on me, not on Home Depot.
So, will I tint the concrete used for the next driveway patch? I don’t know. Ask me in a few years.
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