Cleaning Oil Stains

LESLIE: Rocky in Texas is dealing with a messy driveway. What happened?
 
ROCKY: Hi there. I purchased this house. Apparently it belonged to a mechanic or something. And I am assuming that he hasn’t sealed the concrete driveway and it’s got a whole bunch of patches of what looks like hydraulic fluid and some regular oil, car oil. And I tried a couple of things and it didn’t bring them out.
 
TOM: Well, if it suffered years of abuse at the hands of a mechanic who did lots and lots of oil changes there, Rocky, you’re going to have a heck of a time getting any of that out. I mean if it’s a fresh oil stain, we usually recommend a paste of TSP, trisodium phosphate. In your case, I think we’re well beyond that. So your option right now would be probably to resurface the driveway with an epoxy paint or an epoxy patching compound and basically start over again. The epoxy will stick very, very well to the driveway surface and it’ll look a lot better. And if this oil stain is very old like that, I don’t have any issues about you covering it.
 
ROCKY: Oh, OK. So is there any preparation that I have to do before or I can just wash it off?
 
TOM: There’s generally – yeah, sometimes there’s a neutralizer that has to go on first. I’ll tell you a good website for it because you want a professional product; it’s Abatron – A-b-a-t-r-o-n.com. And in fact, you can contact those folks and they’ll direct you to the exact product you want to use. But they have some really good epoxy coatings that you can put on that driveway and it’ll last for a good number of years.
 
ROCKY: Perfect. Thank you for your wisdom.
 
TOM: You’re welcome, Rocky. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.