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.

opens in a new windowYou can clean off the stains and restore the stucco to like-new appearance with my opens in a new windowCertified 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.