Dark Stains on Stucco

Faith James has a nice home in Dallas, Texas. But now there are some ugly dark stains coming down from the roof onto her stucco.

Here's what she sent me:

"Hi, Tim,

After snow and rain I noticed black streaks down the front of my stucco home, coming from either the roof or the gutters.

Please look at this photo I took:

You can see the staining starting up at the parapet ledge. Photo credit: Faith James

I have a roofer coming out to see which it is, but can you tell me how to clean this stain?

Sorry I can't get on top of the house to see where its coming from."

Guess what? I'm 99.999 percent sure I know the cause of the stains, Faith!

The biggest clue is you told me where you live - near a big city.

I'm quite confident if you were to pay to have a lab analyze the stain, much of it is just diesel engine soot.

I used to have the same problem on the painted siding of my home in Cincinnati, OH. Each year I'd have to wash off my house and I traced the black stains and grim to all the truck traffic on the nearby interstate highways and normal urban traffic of heavy trucks.

You can clean off the stains and restore the stucco to like-new appearance with my Certified organic Stain Solver oxygen bleach.

The Stain Solver is NON-TOXIC and it will not hurt any of your great landscaping like chlorine bleach will. Don't use chlorine bleach or ANY product that says it contains sodium hypochlorite.

It's a powder you mix with warm or hot water and you spray it on the stucco with a hand-pump garden sprayer.

You work in the shade and saturate the stucco with the solution for 15 minutes. You then lightly scrub it with a brush, rinse and it should look fantastic.

I sometimes add a squirt of liquid Dawn dish soap into the Stain Solver solution.