In the last post, I talked about a garage we cleaned that had a weird rubber coating on the floor that kept gumming up our equipment, and I would have preferred failing epoxy. Well, excuse me while I put my foot directly into my mouth!
According to the homeowner, he installed this epoxy DIY with his son in 2003, and he was suspect of the quality from the start. After hearing that, I was actually impressed that it had lasted this long, considering the poor application.
…Until I found out that this floor has NEVER been cleaned! They sweep it out twice a year, and that’s that.
I made sure to make it very clear to the homeowner that a lot of this epoxy would come up during the cleaning, and it turns out, that was the plan!
So I went about our normal cleaning routine: Sweep – Sandbag – Edge – Clean – Flush.
Except during the final flush, I noticed quite a bit of oil coming up from where he parks his car, which isn’t uncommon, but there was little discoloration of the concrete, and the area was about 3′ x 4′. I was a bit confused, and I worked the 25° fan around the area for a good five minutes before I finally figured out what was going on.
The epoxy had failed, but since that area had so little traffic, the epoxy that broke down over the past 18 years had settled into the now porous concrete, and since water has never touched this garage, it stayed put and absorbed every drop of oil that landed on it. So I had to spot clean this small area with the turbo nozzle for a while because it JUST KEPT COMING!
Cleaning failing epoxy is nothing new, but cleaning it for the first time in 18 YEARS was a new one! This cleaning took a little longer than normal, but that might be because the homeowners kept stopping me to give me snacks while I worked.
We came back to clean the lichen stains off the driveway concrete later that month, and you can see that post here.
Concrete Surface Cleaning Details:
Surface: Failing Epoxied Concrete – 1,000 sq/ft
Cleaned: Winter Grime, Oil Drips, Water Stains, Loose Epoxy
