LESLIE: Michael in Florida finds The Money Pit on WGUF and there’s oil on a brick drive. Hopefully we can help. What’s going on. What happens?
MICHAEL: I have a red brick interlocking drive and I have oil stains that are coming from my car. And I found a product called Pour-N-Restore that I’ve used to get rid of the oil. And it does a decent job of getting rid of the black oil but then I’m left with this nasty ring that is continuing on. It looks like I’ve got polka dots all over my driveway. (Leslie chuckles).
TOM: Huh. Hey have you fixed the car yet, Michael?
MICHAEL: Yeah, I actually did.
LESLIE: (chuckling) Good.
TOM: (chuckling) I hope you – that would be a good first step, you know?
LESLIE: Unless you really like cleaning.
TOM: If you had called us before you put on this other chemical product we probably would have told you to try something called TSP; stands for trisodium phosphate.
MICHAEL: Right.
TOM: And you can make a paste of this stuff and cover the oil stains and then let it sit for a bit and rinse it off. Probably not a bad idea to try it now to see if you can pull out anything else that’s causing this stain. But it may in fact be that this product is – has had a chemical reaction with the brick color and you may not be able to change it back.
MICHAEL: OK. Would you recommend putting acid on at all?
TOM: No, because now you’re really going to start to mess with the color. If you want to try to step it up, I mean try to pick at least one area. Because they’re pavers you can actually take that brick out of the driveway and take it to another area and see if you can sort of test some different cleaning processes on it there. But the other thing to think about is if you have all of these spots and you do have pavers you can simply replace those areas that are damaged with new pavers because they’re fairly interchangeable.
MICHAEL: OK. Well I’ll give the TSP a shot and see how that works.
TOM: Alright, Michael. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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