Oil Stains – How to remove oil stains from concrete

How to remover oil stains from concrete?  Whether it be your driveway, your drive through or parking outside your office.  It’s a question that comes up a lot.  In fact, it is searched about 100 times a day on google by people just like you.  So, why are oil stains such a problem?  Isn’t removing oil stains from concrete just rinsing it off?  Not exactly and you need to make sure you stay compliant by keeping it out of the storm drains.

 

To better understand the problem, you need to look at how oil and concrete mix.  Concrete during the drying process creates pores.  Some you can see and some are too small.  What happens is it creates tiny pockets to catch things small enough to come in.  Now, when oil, which is a big contrast in color falls on oil, it will drop to i’s lowest point.  This means some of the oil is on top of the surface, or in tiny pores right on the surface, but the rest runs down into the pores and below the surface.

 

This is where rinsing it off will do two things:

1 Get only the surface oil removed

2 Move some of the surface oil in to other pores around the original oil stain

 

BIO-DRY’s Waterless Concrete Cleaner is made with ultrafine material that gets down to 5 microns in size.  Yes, tiny.  This helps get the product in to the pores of the concrete and below the surface.  Once below the surface, the product can absorb the wet oil and the bacteria can break down the harmful oil in to water and CO2.  Bacteria, unlike enzymes will continue to reproduce as long as there is a food source (oil and other hydrocarbons like hydraulic fluid, grease, and gasoline.)  And with over 5 billion colony forming units of bacteria in every pound, that’s a lot of oil that can be consumed.

 

Our product works well on recent oil stains and results are noticed after the first application.  Additional applications continue to remove more oil farther down in the pores of the concrete.

Application is easy.  Just apply it to the oil stain, pushing into the pores of the concrete by sweeping back and forth or even stepping on it to push it down.  Then just check weekly as needed.  That’s pretty simple.  No fancy equipment needed and usually can be performed in a matter of minutes.

 

Try Bio-Dry today for your driveway oil stain remover or use it at your business to improve the image and safety of your business.