Oil on driveways

I got some drive cleaner from the local garden centre. If anything, it started to dissolve the bitumen from the tarmac, but left the oil stains intact.

The best suggestion I've had is to get a mop and bucket and paint the entire driveway in oil. That way the stains don't show!

David.

Also, better not let the Americans know you have oil on the driveway or they'll probably invade your road, overthrow your landlord and occupy your house.

David

The balance has to be found between cleaning the oil off, and still keeping some driveway down :-)

Try this... If you have one particular area that is badly stained, make a small 'wall' around it with sand - like a doughnut I guess.

Next get some serious degreaser and pour it into the newly formed well, but you only need a little bit - not too deep...

Give it 30 minutes or so then pour in a small packet of 'cat litter', which is the same as, but cheaper than, the granules designed for pretty much the same job.

Try to leave the cat litter as long as you can - it should 'lift' the oil away. If you have a 'normal' Land Rover, you'll need to repeat this several times on different parts of the drive, outside the pub, Tesco...

Martyn

A liberal scrubbing with concrete dust might work.

A bit of old carpet with a sheet of plastic between the carpet and concrete to stop the oil seeping through should prevent any further staining.

In my old 2A-FC I kept a small strip of carpet handy to throw beneath to catch the drips when parked. That seemed to work very well.

A product I bought from Halfrauds worked best for me, it was called Gunk Driveway cleaner.

Hmm. Surely not worth all the hassle. Take the drive up and turn it over, thus exposing the clean side.

Alex

I'm told Coke is a cracker for this (or it might have been Diet Coke).

Tim Hobbs

'58 Series 2 '77 101FC Ambulance '95 Discovery V8i

You might try looking for trisodium phosphate, TSP. This is a strong detergent which is often recommended for cleaning up oil. I would wet down the area, sprinkle a liberal amount of TSP on the spots and let it soak for a few hours. Then scrub with a stiff brush. Repeat until clean.

Very ecological. As you could wring all the oil out at the end of the week as well.

SJC

A valid idea, also good for cleaning old coins.

Certainly not to be sniffed at...

Martyn

By that logic, you are very welcome to come up for the weekend and help me turn the whole road over outside the house :-)

Martyn

Why not sprinkle the affected areas with oil cleaner grit ? We used to use it in a Converted grain store when we were working on our Moxy's & Cats. The result's were a totally clean floor which is back now in use as the Grain store it was designed. But for the life of me can i remeber it's name....sorry

Nightmare, my landlord has complained..... I have tried a few products but nothing is particularly effective. I'm trying to get it out of tarmac (unfortunatly quite new..)

Has anyone has tried an aggressive oven cleaner?

Guy

After the oil feed pipe on my Disco came loose (think it was feed, went into top of oil filter) and left a couple of pints of black stuff on a fairly new block paved drive, I used GUNK from Halfords.

Spent nearly all day Sunday spraying, jet washing, scrubbing, spraying jet washing, scrubbing.

Result - bugger all. Still have the patches.

This "little" set back cost me an oil change, £15 in cleaning materials, and stopped me going to Abingdon. :-(

H.

On or around 8/10/03 8:22 am, Guy Lux using , in article ID snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com, scribbled:

Luckily my landlord is also a big Land Rover fan himself, so he won't be too worried if my vehicles leak!

Slight word of warning here. Wear a mask (to protect nose and mouth) when spraying driveways/patios etc (esp. when trying to remove obvious carcenogens (sp?)). Just a pointer, not a be all and end all, but it can cause health problems.

Neil

If you cannot clean the blocks satisfactorily, turn them over and expose the other side !

Andrew

Thanks for all your help. Favourites so far are covering the rest of the driveway in oil (already working on this one by parking in a slightly different place every evening!) and turning the concrete over to reveal the clean side (I think the previous resident might have already tried this trick! ;)

Any further practical thoughts and experiences welcome.

Regards

Henry

Just read the other replies. I wondered whether maybe a steam cleaner might help remove or at least loosen the oil? You know the type that you use to steam off old wallpaper?

Maybe someone on here will holler about it not being a good idea for some reason I'm not familiar with, but maybe it's something else to try?

PoP