A Guide to Efficient Parking Lot Salting for Businesses

When weather conditions affect your parking lot, and a sheet of ice slicks your sidewalks, it’s tempting to coat your entire commercial property with a thick blanket of rock salt or ice melt. Repeatedly.

But too much salt can be as dangerous as not enough. How do you decide on how much salt to use?

At Neave Group, we hear a lot of questions about the science of snow and ice removal. And it is a science. Here’s a look at why efficient parking lot salting is essential.

How Much Salt Is Enough?

Snow removal professionals use a formula to determine how much rock salt – sodium chloride – to apply. It’s based on pavement temperature.

When the pavement temperature exceeds 30 degrees, 3 pounds of salt per 100 square feet of ground should be applied. At 25 to 30 degrees, the amount increases to 5 pounds per 100 square feet.

The amount of salt increases incrementally as the temperature decreases. But salt is no longer effective when the temperature gets too low — about 15 degrees. Applying it then is a waste of time and money, especially since the cost of salt has recently skyrocketed.

A snow truck with plow in a commercial lot applying salt to a parking lot

Yes, There’s Such A Thing As Too Much Salt

Straight rock salt is great for light snow and managing ice but not so great for other things, from cars to landscaping to indoor flooring. What kind of damage can excessive salting do?

Indoor Salt Damage

Bringing salt indoors on your shoes or boots can ruin the carpets, flooring, and furniture. Rock salt can fade the carpet’s color and strip the urethane coating off of wood and tile floor surfaces, leaving them susceptible to damage from moisture, abrasion, and dirt.

Vehicular Salt Damage

Too much rock salt is terrible for cars. That’s why you see everybody in line at the car wash right after a winter storm. The biggest threat is rust, which is accelerated by repeated exposure to salt. Rust on certain parts of a car can create all sorts of problems, from hydraulic brake system leaks to frame damage.

Landscape Salt Damage

“Salt burn” can damage trees, shrubs and planting beds, and many commercial properties have valuable landscaping near their parking lots and sidewalks. As the rock salt dissolves and spreads to the adjacent soil, plant roots absorb it. Apply salt haphazardly, and it will kill or severely damage your plant life.

To minimize salt damage on your landscape, try Neave’s approach: Install silt fences around landscaped areas close to parking spaces and sidewalks to keep salt from spraying onto landscaped beds.

Risk To Pedestrians

Sometimes, less is more. Too much salt in parking lot traffic lanes or on sidewalks is hazardous for pedestrians, too. Applying less salt allows the granules to dissolve correctly, creating a steady surface to walk on.

After a snowfall, monitoring the amount of salt left behind on walkways and blowing off any excess is always important. In addition, buildings, doorways, and air conditioning units should be checked to ensure salt isn’t lurking in places where it shouldn’t be.

Timing Is Everything

When winter weather strikes, timing is everything. Neave crews proactively begin anti-icing with salt brine before accumulation builds. Our custom brine solution, a liquid salt mixture, can prevent ice from forming and keep snow from sticking.

Should You Do Your Own Snow And Ice Removal?

It’s tempting to salt your commercial property yourself during the winter season, especially if it’s small. It would save a lot of money, right? Not necessarily. The cost of rock salt and ice melt has increased dramatically in the past year. You don’t want to waste it with excessive salt usage.

Another crucial issue is the liability associated with not pre-treating your commercial property. The money you pay for commercial snow removal is tiny compared to the millions you might pay in a lawsuit.

Neave Group’s snow removal business records when trucks go out, how long they’re on a property, what time they leave, and how much de-icer they apply. All of that is important if you’re facing a slip-and-fall lawsuit.

Neave Has Commercial Snow Removal Under Control

Neave Snow and Ice Management know precisely how much salt to use on your property and the correct salt application techniques. Neave uses Salt-Traxx, an innovative tracking device that plugs into a salt spreader controller and records valuable job site data, including time spent and the amount of salt needed and used for each job. This information is saved to a USB memory stick, and at the end of the day, all information can be uploaded to a personal computer.

Neave Keeps The Salt Where It Belongs

Neave will work with property managers to create a fully customized commercial snow removal management plan that addresses your winter weather needs.

We’re fully insured, offer the highest level of customer service, and have years of experience in commercial snow removal. Our commitment to excellence has put us among Snow Magazine’s Top 100 snow contractors in North America.