Cleaning oil off concrete - recommended products/procedures?

Gary Ward said:
I plan to have some kind of coating on the concrete floor when the walls and ceiling get painted. Got fresh drywall on the walls, want make it nice for my wife to park her suv in there along with some of her antiques that she sells. Always loading them in and out of her suv.View attachment 154426
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I used the Rustoleum 2-part epoxy and it still looks great after 20 years and has been easy to clean. As with any sort of coating, surface preparation is the most important step. If you choose to use it, be aware of the temperature as it affects the cure time. The instructions explain these details.
 
One cannot do this today, but in the olden days, we'd cover the spot with kitty litter, then soak it in gasoline. The gas thinned the oil, and most of it was sucked right up.
 
FYI: I removed the kitty-litter and Oil-Dri, and it looked OK. Not great, but... better. Then when I drenched it in dawn soap and water, the oil spot looked really dark again (bad), and that was the case even after drying it off for a few days. So I threw down more oil-dri yesterday to sort of soak up whatever oil/moisture and and will try again. This time washing with simple clean, since I bought that as well.

What seems to help the most is just crushing the oil-dri into the ground and grinding it against the concrete with my foot. It'd take about 10 hours to do the whole thing like that, so hoping that's not necessary.

Will post a photo when I go sweep up the current batch of oil-dri.
 
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Also, random sidebar commentary but why the hell does every Dawn bottle contain a picture of a squeaky clean duck with comments like "gentle on wildlife!"? I imagine using it to aggressively clean greasy crap like dishes and floors is a much more common use case than people hopping in their car and driving to the park to wash ****ing ducks. Just a random observation.
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
Also, random sidebar commentary but why the hell does every Dawn bottle contain a picture of a squeaky clean duck with comments like "gentle on wildlife!"? I imagine using it to aggressively clean greasy crap like dishes and floors is a much more common use case than people hopping in their car and driving to the park to wash ****ing ducks. Just a random observation.
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Long ago, there was an oil tanker spill (in Alaska I think). The people doing the clean up used Dawn on crude oil soaked ducks, and they've been running with that ad ever since.
 
WDD said:
Long ago, there was an oil tanker spill (in Alaska I think). The people doing the clean up used Dawn on crude oil soaked ducks, and they've been running with that ad ever since.
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oh no kidding? The Exxon Valdez is what caused the rise of the Dawn Duck? Amusing actually b/c when I did this oil spill in the hangar I actually referred to it as my own personal exxon valdez lol. Maybe the duck makes sense after all!
 
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applying mineral spirits to the stain (being mindful of flammability/vapor/ignition source/ explosion risks and only if it can be done safely will act as a solvent/diluting agent to the oil and the oil dry will be able to pull more of it out once it’s more thinned.
 
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