So I landed my first gas station. I’m not too excited about it because of the night time hours. I will rent a hot water 4gpm machine(this is the highest gpm I have access to) and a 20” surface cleaner. My plan is to treat the really bad oil spots with 50/50 EBC in a pump up. Let it dwell 20 min and agitate. I’ll downstream some cheaper degreaser like zep or purple power on the whole parking lot. I know I can’t mix bleach with the degreaser but I’m thinking I need to at least post treat after cleaning with the degreaser. I also have my own machine that I would like to put to use somehow, it’s just not hot water so I’m thinking I’ll have a guy run that one in areas not as badly oil stained.
Is my plan seem feasible? Will my cold water machine be of any help? Should I just use the hot water on all heavy oil then jump around with the two?
I’m going to buy about 10 cones to block off each working area in sections.
Do I even need to post treat SH after the degreaser?
Why can’t you mix sh and degreaser? It depends on the type of degreaser.
I just did some sidewalks and curbs with a caustic degreaser mixed with some SH downstreamed…dwells 20 minutes …then downstreamed some citric acid to neautralize.
Everything came off like easily.
I personally wouldn’t post treat a commercial gas station pad
Good tip. I’m going to be using the cheap degreaser from homedepot. Im only getting .08c so I don’t want my profit ate up by ebc. Nor do I have time to order more. I just don’t want to leave the stripes that you see without the post treatment. Sometimes I’ve gotten away with pretreatment of 1.2% downstreamed and didn’t need post treatment. I also don’t want to be here longer then needed. It’s about 10k sqft
Get the industrial purple degreaser from hd. I’d use an x jet with no proportioner to get the strongest mix possible. Use hot water to apply yoir mix, it helps. Spray the really bad spots with straight degreaser and agitate with a brush. The cold water wont be good for anything but rinsing. Other than that you should be reclaiming your water. Getting caught washing a bunch of degreaser and oil down storm draims carries heavy fines for both you and the property owner. .08c a sq. Ft isn’t really enough to deal with reclaim imo.
You’re going to be there awhile. Look at the positive side, you’ll probably get to see the sunrise.
You can mix bleach and degreaser, but usually not needed on commercial unless you’ve got some mildew or algae. Won’t hurt to add some though if it makes you feel better or it’s needed.
This was brand new concrete…cleaning up for a condo open house.
Used no pressure…my local chem supplier told me to try it and I’ll be honest it works. After letting the caustic degreaser dwell for 20 minutes…then when applying the citric acid all of the dirt came to the surface. I know it’s the opposite of traditional fleet wash 2 step…but it has the same effect.
I don’t know the science terminology…but the dirt and grime have a zero charge so they clean way easier.
I definitely won’t do it when surface cleaning regular concrete… but one new concrete the 2 step worked amazing.
Just curious, how new was the concrete and how dirty?
There are a bunch of new Chick Fil-As in my area with new pads. They’ll pay to have them cleaned but I dont want to wait a year and a half to do it. It would be cool to be able to clean without pressure.
