A year ago, in one of this site’s most popular posts, I put up this comparison of retail products. That post was almost a year to the day of this post, so it made sense for an update. Keep in mind that the cost of the two dominant products are sensitive to the price of fuel and susceptible to interruptions in the supply chain.
From a retail perspective I “googled” the shopping search engine for driveway sealant products. I got 23 separate products with the following breakdown:
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Asphalt based: 15 products with 9 less than $20 per 5 gallon bucket with a low of $11 and an average of $18 with a 8% decrease in the average price since 2011. It is important to realize the product variability here as well. Some have 1 year warranties, others have as much as 10 years with a cost range between $12 and $32 per bucket. That shows the difference in price, warranty with the quality of the ingredients.
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Coal tar based: 5 products with a low of $11 and an average of $15 but all the available products are less than $20. The average price has decreased about 3% since last year.
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Gilsonite based (a special fossilized asphalt): 2 products with an average of $42
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Acrylic based: 1 product for $40
So you can see for retail products, asphalt sealants already dominate at least the number of products available and come in a variety of qualities and a broad range of costs. I don’t know about the quantity, but since Lowes and Home Depot are generally not selling coal tar sealants anywhere, then that alone could be make asphalt-based sealant products the largest selling retail sealant product.