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Carrie asks, I have a 20 year old Eon deck that has been very good over the years
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Now Eon is a brand, one of the earlier brands of composite decking material, so
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non-wood, the idea is you don't have to finish it. But at this point it seems to
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have lost its surface gloss. We regularly clean the deck with water, then squeegee
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the excess off and towel dry it to remove any lingering dirt. So you can see
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Carrie takes really good care of her deck. This has worked for years but now
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the deck looks hazy and whitish when dry. What can we do to restore the original
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beauty? Well I've run into this myself with my own deck. I have a Trex
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composite deck at my place and it's dark brown and it's beautiful rich color
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really love it. Wash it maybe a couple of times a year but over the last few
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years I've noticed that even though it looks great when it's wet, after scrubbing
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and lots of water rinsing and everything it looks kind of hazy. So as it turns out
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the cause of this is mineral buildup on that plastic. Now in my case and perhaps
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in Carrie's case, the minerals come from two sources. One is the just the natural
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dirt that blows onto a deck. Especially any dirt that has a lot of calcium in it
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Cement dust is really bad for this. Not that that's very common but dust can
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settle on there and it can bond to the surface and it becomes pretty insoluble
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which is the root of the problem. It builds slowly, over time it gets duller and
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duller and whiter and whiter. So you need to apply something to dissolve those
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minerals. Now when I first ran into this problem I thought well how about some
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vinegar? Good strong 7% pickling vinegar. That should eat off the minerals no
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problem. Put some on, let it sit for half an hour, washed it off, let it dry. There
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was some improvement but not a whole lot of improvement. So long and the short
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of it is there are products out there that are meant for dissolving minerals
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so calcium, rust, things like that. There are two that I know of. One is
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called CLR. It's kind of been around a long time. There's another one
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called Crud Cutter. It's a mineral remover and what I have found works
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spectacularly well is you take a product like this mineral dissolving product, you dilute it with water about 50-50, then you just slosh it on the
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surface. I actually use the same brush that I would use to wash the deck which
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is one of those long handled car washing brushes where you can put a garden hose
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on it so you get the soft bristles and then if you want the water flowing out
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as well as you scrub with these soft bristles. So without water flowing I just
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dip it in this tub with a diluted liquid in it, slosh it on the surface, make sure
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it's generously covered, leave it for maybe an hour. In that time depending on
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the weather the stuff could have dried or partially dried but that doesn't seem
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to matter. Just let it sit there, let it do its job and then go back and rinse
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You want to rinse with a lot of water because it's the rinsing that's going to
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get those dissolved and there's now dissolved minerals off the deck. But
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Kerry has done something else here which is pretty important if you have hard
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water which we do here and that's not to let the water lay on the deck after
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you've rinsed it because that water has minerals in it too. Probably very similar to the minerals that you got rid of with the solution. So squeegeeing is good
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I've never gotten on my hands and knees to dry my deck with a towel or anything
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but what I find works very well and quite quickly too is a large leaf blower
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It moves a lot of air and it blows the water off and actually you can even see
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the water drying where this thing is blowing off the water. So you do those
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two things. You dissolve the minerals, rinse the deck thoroughly, blow it off or
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squeegee it off and it's worked well for me in different situations. I think it'll
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work well for Kerry and maybe for you too
