Fixing Pink UPVC and Scorched Lead

Mark Cave

You are rolling up your fifty metre delivery hose on the driveway. Five bedroom detached property, crisp K Rend completely transformed, customer is inside making you a cup of tea. And as you walk past the front porch to grab your lance, your eyes catch it.

Mark Cave

Right there, dead eye level on a brilliant white UPVC door surround, there is this nasty, patchy pinkish orange bloom spreading across the frame. It, it looks like someone took a highlighter to the plastic.

Mark Cave

Your stomach drops right through your boots. You stand there thinking, that is it, I have just melted twelve hundred quid worth of bespoke door frame, the customer is going to walk out any second, and I am ruined. I have seen lads completely lose their heads in that exact second.

Mark Cave

And what is the first thing ninety percent of blokes do? They grab their chemical lance or a bucket of neat stock from the van, and they go to splash more sodium hypochlorite straight over it. Because in their head, bleach turns things white, right? If it has gone a weird colour, douse it in more bleach.

Mark Cave

Do not do that. That is the single worst move you can make on that site. You are literally pouring fuel on the fire. You have not melted the plastic, and it is not a chemical burn that has destroyed the substrate.

Mark Cave

What has actually happened comes down to how UPVC ages out in the British weather. Over five, ten, fifteen years, UV light breaks down the very outer skin of that profile. It exposes microscopic particles, things like titanium dioxide, trace iron, metallic stabilisers that the manufacturer put into the compound.

Mark Cave

When your strong oxidiser, the sodium hypochlorite, hits those tiny degraded metallic elements sitting unsealed on the plastic, it oxidises them instantly. It is literally a flash rust reaction occurring on the top few microns of the surface. That pinky orange brown colour is rust.

Mark Cave

So throwing more oxidiser onto rust just makes it flare harder. What you need instead is simple chemistry. You need chelation. You grab a gentle acid, specifically an oxalic acid based rust remover with built in surfactants. We keep a bottle of Rust X Pro right in the cab door pocket for this exact reason.

Mark Cave

You put a small amount onto a clean microfibre cloth. You do not scrub it aggressively, you just wipe it across that pink patch. And right in front of your eyes, in about thirty seconds, the pink completely vanishes. It pulls the metallic oxidation out of the profile, encapsulates it in the surfactant so it does not redeposit down the plastic, and leaves the frame pure white again.

Mark Cave

Now, that brings us to the second phone call I get from panicked contractors, and this one usually happens when someone is working up at the roofline. You are spraying a roof wash mix, maybe three to four percent hypo, treating heavy moss or lichen. A little breeze picks up, and a bit of fine overspray drifts onto the chimney flashing.

Mark Cave

The lead was bone dry. Within seconds, that soft grey metal turns into an ugly, muddy, scorched dark brown mess. It looks like somebody took a blowtorch to the leadwork, and the customer looks up from the garden and spots dirty brown run marks all across the stack.

Mark Cave

Again, it is oxidation. Dry lead oxide reacts violently with hot sodium hypochlorite. But here is the professional rule, and you should tattoo this inside your head: never, ever let softwash chemical touch dry lead.

Mark Cave

Before your chemical lance even leaves the holster, you drown that lead in pure water. You create a sacrificial water barrier over the entire metal surface. If a bit of overspray drifts over, it does not strike dry lead. It hits that film of water, dilutes down to fractions of a percent instantly, and washes away before any reaction can start.

Mark Cave

If the mistake already happened and you are staring at scorched brown flashing, the rescue is the same principle. You do not leave it for the rain to sort, because the rain will not touch it. You get your surfactant boosted oxalic cleaner, like Lead X Pro, wipe it over the brown oxidation, and it lifts the scorch clean off.

Mark Cave

Once it dries down, you rub in a coat of patination oil. That gives the lead a deep graphite sheen, prevents white carbonate salts from running down the fresh tiles, and leaves that chimney looking ten times better than the day you arrived.

Mark Cave

Look, anyone can buy a cheap pump and go out splashing bleach around. That is not a business, that is gambling with someone else's property. True competence is understanding what is happening on that wall or roof so you never panic, you protect the surfaces properly, and you know the exact chemical antidote if things react.

Mark Cave

Stop learning by trial and expensive error on customer driveways. Jump over to softwashing dot uk, get yourself on the CPD Certified Softwash Training Course, and earn your Approved Applicator status. Do it properly, protect your margins, and work safe.