How Thin is too Thin with Indian Sandstone Paving Slab options?

How thin is too thin with Indian Sandstone Paving Slab options?

There are a few options to consider when purchasing paving slabs for your patio area, once you have decided to choose Indian Sandstone. Still unsure of whether to choose Porcelain Paving or Indian Sandstone click here.

Cash- Conscious Home Buyers considering a new patio area may choose thinner paving slabs over a thicker paving slab to say a few pounds. While Thin Paving slabs may seem the cheaper option it may end of costing more.

The General gold standard when looking for Indian Sandstone paving slabs are 22mm Calibrated. These paving slabs are considered to be the best both for durability and cost effectiveness.

Why are Thin Paving Slabs not as good as thicker paving slabs?

Whether you are choosing thicker paving slabs or thinner slabs over the year our paving slabs go through everything. You might just think that they sit there and look pretty in your garden but they go through extreme colds of winter and then extreme heat in the summer and these weather conditions can put the slabs under a lot of pressure.

During the winter months the paving slabs experience a ‘Freeze-thaw’ Cycle. Inside the paving slabs there are always natural joins that contain minimal amounts of water that is trapped, it happens on a very small scale however these water-filled joins are what makes the freeze-thaw cycle affect the paving. During the colder temperatures this internal water can freeze and expand in size as much as 10%. The pressure that this puts on the stone itself is unbelievable, once the weather rises above freezing this water can rethaw and therefore the paving slabs can relax again. This constant pressure that happens during the colder months can affect the paving so much and eventually will cause the paving to crack and fail as the stone itself isn’t particularly flexible.

So while the slabs may look like they aren’t doing a lot and they are just sat in the garden, they effectively “Breathing” as part of the freeze-thaw cycle during the colder months. This cycle can affect the integrity of the stone over time, no matter how thick the stone it will always go through this cycle. Thinner paving slabs have much less integrity to start with and naturally the tinner the piece of paving slab is the less resilient it is. Every time the paving slabs go through this cycle it affects the stone even more, the thinner the paving slab the quicker the stone will fail. The thicker the tile the more robust it is and therefore the impact of the freezing and thawing will have making it less likely to cause the failure of the slab.

So how thin is too thin?

That is the one of the main questions! The main thing is to balance the cost and benefit to the thickness of the paving slab. The thinner the slab, the more area coverage can be packed into a patio pack crate, therefore the most cost-effective it is. The thicker the slab is, the less chance of it failing during the freeze-thaw cycle.

10 years ago the standard thickness of the Indian Sandstone paving slabs were between 25mm-35mm thick, and they worked well for the job, aged well and handled the elements well and very rarely failed however the issue was due to the uncalibrated thickness the packs had less m2 coverage resulting in a high cost per square meter.

Nowadays there a generally a couple of main types of paving slabs 18mm and 22mm calibrated. These new 22mm calibrated paving slabs were introduced in order to meet the consumer need of more cost-effective paving.

Since then, the 22mm calibrated paving slabs has become the gold standard. 2mm is thick enough so that it maintains its integrity through the elements and the dimensions mean that they are able to fit inside a crate to have a decent quantity.

Now we are seeing the cost-saving measures pushed to the max so far we are seeing 20mm calibrated, 18mm calibrated and sometimes 15/16mm paving slabs in order to pack more paving slabs into a crate.

Here at Melton Stone we pride ourselves on stocking the gold standard of Indian Sandstone paving slabs.

Take a look here at our full range including:

Kandla Grey

Raj Green

Rippon Buff

Autumn Brown

Fossil Mint

As the industry we are in there has been no formal testing to definitively say what paving slabs should be used. However we would always recommend choosing the 22mm calibrated paving slabs as the have a good resilience to the elements and are cost effective as well.

Should you have any more questions please feel free to get in touch with our friendly sales team

Email – sales@meltonstone.co.uk

Phone – 01482 688008