plainpainter

I'm all for $750 housewashes. If you guys are feeling guilty give your time to charity or something. Residents should be charged fairly for every item.

After a short perusing of this thread - I think the soul of Ron's comments are that you can't judge a process just by the ingredients you use. It depends upon other parameters such as how little or how much of the said ingredients you use or with what other chemicals is it mixed with or what temperatures they are applied with. I mean if you state absolutes such as - sodium hydroxide is dangerous, without qualifying how it it dangerous, then you may be mislead into thinking all cosmetics and toiletries that contain sodium hydroxide are harmful and shouldn't be bought - well, guess what - lots of toiletries and cosmetics in fact do contain sodium hydroxide and many on products that claim 'hypo-allergenic'. Just goes to show you can't make absolute statements - everything has exceptions and every statement should be followed with a 'well, it isn't that simple'. This reminds me of the many times Rod claims that bleach is bad for wood - not going off topic - just using an example. What Rod failed to do was qualify with a statement such as - bleach is harmful for wood if used at rates higher than 200ppm and at dwells of anything longer than 2 minutes or without surfactants, etc, etc, etc. The fact is bleach may be very harmful for wood in the wrong hands using the wrong methods - but may be made very safe depending upon what other chemicals that are mixed with it, at certain dilutions, with certain dwell times, and of course followed by proper neutralization techniques - there are products out there called 'Bleach stop' Any chemical in improper dilutions, improperly mixed, improperly applied can cause nightmares - Absolute statements are junk - another that comes to mind is that linseed oil products are a veritable feast for mold and mildew - ha ha ha ah aha hahaa ha......until next time.

Ken - by any chance, is this one of those products that claims 7 year warrantees? Silicone that gets deep in the wood? Kind of sounds like that Dr. Gunther von Hagens 'BodyWorld' Plastination process to preserve human bodies - creepy! I guess maybe a low pressure bath of several hundred gallons of Acetone per deck should do the trick.

Don't know much about HD80 - but compared to what I do - I would use 12 oz. of the stuff to a gallon of water - add a pint of propylene glycol based anti-freeze - add some more surfactant - lay it on the wood and cover up with a thin sheet plastic drop cloth. Let it sit for 2 hrs. Rinse. Repeat. Make sure to use the 1 mil plastic - water can actually travel through it - so you can mist right over the plastic - and it will keep adding moisture to the wood.

How do you apply, straight - i.e. pump up, downstream, or x-jet - until we know what your method is - and consequently what the final dilution is on the surface - then any answer will be irrelevent.

Heck - I tried WTW once late last season and liked it - I guess I am easy like that. But I like linseed oil too - it's my bread and butter - linseed oil is in all my favorite products from exterior wood primers to solid oil stains, transparent stains - I like it Raw and Boiled and make my own recipes for penetrating old dried out wood such as window sills - where water can make paint peel. I am thinking of two part wood restoration process - a first coat of a parafinnic oil stain - topcoated by my favorite polymerized tung/linseed oil stain load with pigments. Best of of both worlds boys - if you don't put a 'Cap' on your bottle how do you expect the 'milk' from not evaporating away?

hey post some after pics, I'd love to see how that mix cleans that place up - If all works well, I may just start buying bob's products and forget mixing my own stuff.

1 gallon of simple cherry? Isn't simple cherry a powder? Why not follow Bob's advice and add a little gutter bomb to the simple cherry mix.

Sikkens has such a great reputation - even when I go to homes with failing sikkens stains - people still talk about how much they love the stuff. Anyways - why not just put the acetone directly into the sikkens and then apply? Sort of like the principle behind 'bonding' primers - where they emulsify any surface they come into contact with before setting up.

Well yeah - that Deck restoration guy would be me. Almost a year ago to the date. I stripped my folks deck - took like 7-8 times making the most nasty brews of lye and Sodium Metasilicate - I couldn't get the stuff off! And then the old boards - now 20, then 19 years old were badly grooved from a previous pressure washer and the boards were overall cupped. So I recessed all the nails and put in deck screws where needed and then used a porter cable tool meant to take 20-30 layers of paint off of clapboards, and milled the boards flat! And went over the whole deck - some parts are only 8-9 years old - with another portercable power sander with 60 grit. It rained about for 2 weeks after that. so I never neutralized the deck - just waited for the moisture to go away. and then applied stain sometime in May. Yesterday it was sprinkling out - so I wanted to see how the decks would clean up - I figure I will put another coat on this year of what was my favorite deck stain. so I sprinkle on Oxi-clean and scrubbed it in in areas, and reapplied again and let sit for several hours and scrubbing several times in between, before finally rinsing off with a hose late at night. And here are the photos of the cleaned up spots.

well I was still experimenting with my stripper at that time. But it was Muralo's tung oil deck stain over a coat of California's deck stain - stain application was separated by one year. In contrast after restoring the deck with one coat of Muralo - it is coming off like the dickens, in its defense - I did not neutralize - but it rained for like a week and a half after stripping. I figured that was neutralization by itself - was I wrong, or is the product now crap?

Ken - you're right - but I am a tinkerer - I use NP-9 nonylphenol surfactant. It seems to rinse pretty good - I have my very caustic deck stripper recipe down to a "T" now. I wouldn't purchase anybody else's stripper - as mine works extremely well. It melts heavy deposits of CWF - Sikkens ol' fasion Deck and DecBase - I even strip acrylic solid stain with ease - and to boot I get absolutely no raising of the grain. Perhaps it cost me time to figure out a good recipe - now I just want a good recipe that will strip a failing stain without having to do much in the way of masking off adjacent structures. I guess in the end it's easier buying Russel's or Bob's products - and certainly would do so if I had 'help' - as I wouldn't bother trying to teach them to mix chems, and it's all around safer just telling them to pourt this product into that bucket - presto, done. But at the moment I am a one man band - and if I find a good deal on oxyclean at some discount store - and I know a good recipe that will work - why not? So now - do I stay with Flood's Deckswood for neutralizing/brightening or go with somebody else's product? It makes 20 gallons that you can apply with a pump up sprayer - is it more cost effective somewhere else - do I get my own oxalic crystals and mix with NP-9? To be or not to be? LOL

Sure oxyclean isn't the same - but it is sodium percarbonate and sodium carbonate. I imagine add a surfactant - and voila EFC-38. I will make a recipe that will strip this deck and post pics in the next few weeks.

well Ken - you have a point - in that 4 foot stretch I dumped a capful i.e. 1/8th cup of oxyclean powder - I'd have to dissolve a lot of oxyclean into water if I was going to use that strength in a pump sprayer or what not. But it did smell nasty, just like lye, and it liquified the old stain. No offense to Russell - but I have lots of Oxyclean on hand I need to use up - and as a result have been augmenting it with other chems to get it to work. Last fall I was using a 1/4 cup of Oxyclean and a 1/4 cup of TSP to a gallon of warm water in a pump sprayer - and was cleaning up badly mildewed greyed decks - did a retaining wall of pressure treated railroad ties with this recipe - cleaned up beautifully prior to solid oil staining them.

Here is another board I did with oxy-clean - it gives a better idea of how the board was cleaned up. This was my favorite Tung Oil based deck sealer. Apparently Oxi-clean ain't just for laundry - and look it can strip! I just left it on in drizzly rain - I wanted to see how the boards would clean up - as they look like total cr@p. oxi-clean is 50% sodium percarbonate and the rest sodium carbonate and fillers - not as strong as TSP, but was giving off lye and TSP like fumes. If EFC-38 can strip a failing stain then why not oxi-clean? I have been using it to clean up decks last fall - was adding TSP to the mix now I will be adding a surfactant to come up with a perfect stripper/cleaner.

if it's vinyl and this is film-forming stain - just get lacqer thinner. One problem - if the siding is chalky, it may smear the color a bit into the siding. I ripped off a roof once and didn't blue tarp - and got all these black smears on a white vinyl siding house - when I went to use lacquer thinner, it smeared it in deeper and turned yellow. But when I pressure washed the area prior - with TSP/Lye/detergent. The marks where still there - but when I went to wipe now with lacqer thinner - they came off easily with no smearing - the chalkiness was now gone due to pressure washing.

Try adding Propylene Glycol antifreeze to your F-18 mix, if that won't remove it - I hardly doubt HD80 will either. Call Bob back.

Hey better yet - buy some Flood products, and keep them around the jobsite - and tell 'em those are the chemicals you used. How can they prove otherwise?

Why would you strip and brighten? Just get a good bleach mix and clean the fence and rinse, rinse, rinse. There doesn't seem to be any previous product on that fence. I know some guys here love to apply the strip, brighten and stain procedure to fences that just have greyed wood and algae. But if this customer wants a reasonbly priced job - go with a efc-38 clean and then stain. That's what I would do with my own fence - perhaps it's more professional to apply the same process to just greyed wood as you would to failing semi-trans stains. But come on - vertical wood surfaces have very long lasting finishes with even the most basic prep procedures. I'd love someone from here to 'split' a deck in half - one half clean with efc-38 or similar product, the other half - use a caustic cleaning solution like F-18, then balance with citralic/oxalic acid and then stain stain both sides and see if there really is a difference in longevity over time. This is just for decks with greying wood/algae/lichen/mildew - no old sealer product.

Between Ken and Russell - I am going to dump my home brews. I see no problem mixing chems with my understanding - but this society is getting to be the most ridiculous blame game - actually I have had problems with tenement properties in the past - single home owners have not been a problem - but the second I step on multi-housing property - there always seems to be issues - to the point I get white trash yelling at the top of their lungs at me. One lady once blamed me for her picture frames falling off her walls - when I scrubbed the side of the home just prior to rinsing - can you believe that?

Ken - is it unlawful to apply cleaning chemicals that are all sold in some market be it online, hardware store, etc? If I make a brew of lye, tsp, 12% - what did I do wrong? On the side of Savogran TSP box - they give you a recipe for removing mildew. You carry around msds sheets for the benefit of firemen in case they have to clean your wrecked rig off of a highway. But I don't see how this is at all relevant to some crazy lady - what's the alternative - not use chemicals? Are these commercial places going to get cleaened or not - what law out there states that I have to give some homeowner an msds sheet? I ain't manufacturing chemical mixes for resale - they're all there on my truck in raw form TSP - Sodium Metasilicate - Sodiym Hypochlorite - Lye - Etc. That I all bought legally - that I use to clean homes with. I know you have to be licensed to use certain chemicals like crop sprayers over fields of soybeans or what not - but going to clean homes with Bleach and TSP subsitute you can find at any hardware supply - and then mix it into some pail and then apply and rinse - what was illegal about that? What are the facts? Perhaps your insurance agent would drop on the spot - and use this as an excuse - but heck insurance companies are just a bunch of scams - and will make up rules on the spot to not protect us. I just have never heard anything illegal about mixing basic cleaning agents to go and clean something - the second you mix bleach with water - isn't that a brew - or adding a scoop of simple cherry or TSP or what not. I say this whole business about giving the customer an msds sheet is poppy **** - if you give the pres the sheet - who will in absolutely hand it off to her - because he won't protect you one iota - then this lady will find some aggressive lawyer itching to go after you and make money. Because remember - civil courts aren't about who is right and who is wrong it's about what amount both parties can agree on.

You know this got me thinking....you know those pumps you use to pump water out of a basement. Imagine hooking one of those to a hose and the other end to your pressure washer - and then throw the pump into the backyard pool - if the homeowners have one - and use that water to clean their home with - hee hee hee. I know unprofessional, blah blah blah - would it work? Maybe you would have to rinse with fresh water, eventually.

Jeff - ever throught about getting the woman knocked off? You know - dirty deeds done dirt cheap! Hee hee. I sometimes get a bellyache working with my bleach house mix - but that's because I was scrubbing a whole hand for hours - like 8 - without proper protection. Someone who just walks by....well I am sure if you lived deep in the amazonian and ate what grew on the forest floor - and then came to civilization and walked by motor car exhaust and someone pressure washing - sure it may give 'em the runs, but for the most part people have to accept this as a way of life for living in society - I would not have given the president anything. It's none of his business - unless he tells you what chems he wants you to use, and whether you agree to go along or not. But nothing positive can come of him having those documents - should a mechanic give out msds for everytime he works on a customer car? Come on - the EPA has ruled out tons of chemicals for commercial and home uses - to use these chemicals in a way that they were not designed for is a federal crime! So that means either you are obeying the law or you aren't - let that crazy bi*tch get a lawyer - what's the pres going to do? "Here you go ma'am - here is the msds" Then she will say - "Oh dear it has harmful oxidizing chemicals - I am going to sue!!!" Try looking under the average sink - my mom has hydrofluoric acid rust remover - and doesn't even know it!

Rick - if you knew anything about the mathematics and computer modelling involved for weather prediction - you would know that prediction is futile. It amazes me that those nightly news weather guys still go back and try and try over and over again - if they could accurately predict just 48 hours, I would be extremely happy.

Won't Muriatic acid with a surfactant clean brick right up?