Ralph Q
New member
Back in 1996 I started a pressure washing business in New Jersey. I Was very interested in deck cleaning/restoration. I absorbed as much info as I could and was on the bulletin boards a lot. I remember Everett, Shane, Greg Rentschler and Jim Bilyeu.
There was a lot of discussion back then about bleach and wood, and if you said you were using bleach to clean wood you were chastised and sometimes considered a pariah for just the thought. The talk was that bleach broke down the lignin, dried out and compromised the integrity of the wood. I believed that back then. So I used nothing but Sodium percarbonate to clean a deck and sodium hydroxide to strip a deck followed by citric or oxalic acid to neutralize.
For various reasons I left the deck restoration biz in 2003, so I was quite shocked when I decided to start up a pressure washing business in Florida in 2012, and I started frequenting the bulletin boards again, and I saw that people were using bleach and sodium hydroxide to clean wood! It's like a total 360! I'm not saying it is right or wrong, it just goes against everything I learned back then.
Either the information back then was wrong, and long as you oil the wood after you use bleach., then, no harm no foul and it's all good. But to me that means, all the bleach did was remove some of the natural oils in the wood and you replaced it. But if you destroyed the lignin in the wood, then I don't see how oiling the wood is going to fix that. Breaking down, and destroying the lignin is going to leave microscopic caverns in the wood that lets water and fungus and whatever inside, which is what Jim is saying. You can't fix that damage by oiling the wood.
There was a lot of discussion back then about bleach and wood, and if you said you were using bleach to clean wood you were chastised and sometimes considered a pariah for just the thought. The talk was that bleach broke down the lignin, dried out and compromised the integrity of the wood. I believed that back then. So I used nothing but Sodium percarbonate to clean a deck and sodium hydroxide to strip a deck followed by citric or oxalic acid to neutralize.
For various reasons I left the deck restoration biz in 2003, so I was quite shocked when I decided to start up a pressure washing business in Florida in 2012, and I started frequenting the bulletin boards again, and I saw that people were using bleach and sodium hydroxide to clean wood! It's like a total 360! I'm not saying it is right or wrong, it just goes against everything I learned back then.
Either the information back then was wrong, and long as you oil the wood after you use bleach., then, no harm no foul and it's all good. But to me that means, all the bleach did was remove some of the natural oils in the wood and you replaced it. But if you destroyed the lignin in the wood, then I don't see how oiling the wood is going to fix that. Breaking down, and destroying the lignin is going to leave microscopic caverns in the wood that lets water and fungus and whatever inside, which is what Jim is saying. You can't fix that damage by oiling the wood.