Whole patio sloped wrong way - a tamper will not help. Probably make matters worse.

Individual pavers sloped - can maybe correct with tamping but will probably break pavers and will only work on those pavers where some of it is sticking up, not if whole paver is sunk below patio.

Bottom line: something is missing in the design and construction and if you don't fix ir properly your patio will continue to slide and tamping may accelerate it. Maybe inadequate retaining of the substrate (gravel/sand)? Or inadequate drainage?

Good luck! And hey, it happens to all of us at some time - we had to do a little resloping ourselves recently.

Have to agree with what Karin said. You most likely have a drainage problem that will get worse with every big storm. Not only will you have to lift all the pavers, you must fix the drainage. If this was professionally done, I'd harass the builders. If you did it yourself, I suggest getting a book on stone and reading how they address drainage problems. I know it sounds like a PITA, but once fixed, you'll be able to really enjoy that patio.

Ok here's what happened: I started building this paver patio right off my back porch. The area is surrounded on 3 sides by foundation so there is no retaining problem. The patio is rather large (25' wide X 6' deep). I started laying the rows widthwise building away from the house. Since the area is so wide, I did not lay all the pavers at once, and then try to level them but rather I 'leveled' each one individually as I laid it in place using a rubber mallet to pack each one into place, with respect to the adjacent pavers keeping each one flush with the one previous so I knew they were sloping away from the porch.
The problem is, after I got a few of the rows installed, we had a light rain, which, without my knowing, caused the pavers to settle, and as I laid new ones, they were elevated slightly higher than the previous ones. Now water runs off my roof and gathers in the first few rows of pavers and up onto my porch rather than running away from the house. I'm only talking maybe 1cm elevation difference between the front and the back of the patio. I can 'reslope' the pavers individually, away from the house with the mallet, but this is somewhat crude since they are already installed, and terribly time consuming.
This is why I asked about using a machine. I found out the name of the machine for this is called a 'Compaction Plate', not the Power Tamp, as I had originally thought.
Does anyone have experience with a compaction plate? And will it work for this?

thanks,
Dennis

What did you use under the pavers? How much gravel or sand? What's under that? What did you do for drainage?

We've had the compacter (whatever the heck you call it) in and it is a honking big thing that is hard to move and not easy to use. It puts my husband in a very bad mood every time we get one. But aside from that, I kind of doubt that tamping is really going to change the slope. Seems like you either have to scoop out some of the sand from under the outer rows of pavers, or add sand to the inner rows. There are no shortcuts - either is a hideous prospect, compared to sitting ON the patio having the cool one you'd planned on!

You shouldn't really ever think about levelling pavers individually. You also shouldn't level them until they are surrounded on all four sides. You need to take them all out, level ALL the base material the way you want it to go, and then install them all back. THEN you tamp. As an alternative to the compacter or individual whacking, you can do what we did last time - cut a piece of three-quarter inch plywood about 18 inches square and lay that over a patch of pavers and pound that with your mallet. What you're actually doing when you compact is forcing substrate up between the pavers, and you lose that stabilizing matrix if you level individually as you place.