Hi,

Most people on this blog seem to like the sealant 511. I originally purchased Porous Plus (which is made by the same company) for $235 for my marble. When my installer went to use it, we couldn't find a guaranty for the estimated timeframe before it needed to be resealed and he was surprised at the cost. He got another sealer at Home Depot that cost $95 and was guaranteed to work for 20 years. Now I don't put much stock in guarantees having worked in the marketing department of a large corporation. But a product with a 20 year guaranty in my opinion would be better than a product that doesn't make any claims at all. Even if the first product only worked for half of the time stated (10 years), I thought it would still be a better product. Don't know yet if that was a correct assumption or not.

When I went to return the Miracle Porous Plus, the Tile store would not take it back because they said it had been kept at a temperature lower than 55 degrees and now couldn't be used or resold (which given the recent warm weather here was questionable at best). My contractor never heard of that and the temperature requirement was not stated on the product container nor did the salesperson mention that to me. I made sure to tell the salesperson that this was my first remodel and that I wanted a product which required the least amount of maintenance.

I'm curious to see the other comments from this thread but from what I read so far, 511 seems to be the sealer of choice. You might want to check with some installers or fabricators and see what sealer they recommend.

Good luck!
Karen

511 is what I have used for years for all of my
customers, however that't not to say that 511 is
the ONLY product that will work..

There's a new product that I am testing from
Surface Treatment Technologies that looks pretty cool too.
I'll post my findings in about a week or so.

The ordeal you went through in trying to return perfectly
good 511 sounds wierd to me - there's no policy that I know
of that has that in it - it's a silicone for cryin out loud...

if you still have the 511 - use it -
In our last home, I installed Golden Amendoa 2cm Granite
in the kitchen in July of 2000.
We sold the home in January of 2005 -
and we never needed a second coat of sealer all the time
we lived in the home -
and the Granite was really light.... the 511 worked pretty good.......

(oh yeah - we did the kitchen table in matching Granite too...)

kevin

Kevin M. Padden MIA SFA
Fabricator, Trainer & Consultant to the Natural Stone Industry
www.azschoolofrock.com

Two things to remember with sealing granite:

1) there's a huge variation how porous different stones are. Some don't need to be sealed at all and some need it depressingly often. You should be able to test yours by putting a drop of water on and leaving it for an hour. Come back and if nothing has soaked in then you're still good. If it's darkened then it's soaked in and you should seal because if it was something more permanent like wine or grape juice or oil, you'd have to work to get the stain out.
2) maybe it's a sales ploy but just about everyone recommends resealing with the same sealer you previously applied. I can see it making sense, you're applying a sealer in a solvent over another sealer and you want them to play nice with each other.

The restrictions on what you can use to clean your counters are really based on not breaking down the sealer. If you don't need to seal it then you can pretty much use what you want.