How to Clean a Rubber Roof

Once a year, it's important to get up on top of the roof and clean and condition it. Now the rubber and TPO manufacturers have a 10 year warranty most of them, on the roof material. That's only if it's cleaned and conditioned on a regular basis. So what we're gonna do is get up on top, here we're gonna use this rubber conditioner cleaner and conditioner, and I'm not gonna spray it on because of the size of this. We're gonna empty them into the bucket here.

Some of the tougher spots I've got a Mildew and stain remover. We've got a few rust spots and some awnings I wanna possibly use this into and a spot clean. And you gotta be careful up on the roof because it's gonna be very slippery. I've got a pretty good grip on a tennis shoes here but what I'm also gonna do, I'm gonna start at the front, and just kind of do a corner at a time, and I'm not gonna wash the whole rig down first. I'm gonna do just that corner.

Then I'm gonna clean it, rinse it off that way I can kind of minimize walking on a wet surface as much as possible. I'll still probably have to do a little bit of it but I'm just gonna use a mop and I liked this one because, not only does it have the mop side here, but if I have a real tough stain then I've got a bristle brush that I can get onto it a little harder and I don't have to get down on my hands and knees. So with that, we're gonna start off. First of all, take my hose here. You can see there's quite a few black streaks.

What we see up there in those hand prints, that's typically gonna be silicone, when the workers were putting this in. So we're just gonna get our mop. Good and wet here. I'm gonna come down here I still got some good footing, and I'm just gonna go in a circular motion with this. As you can see not a whole lot of, real scrubbing needs to be done and if you do it more often then you don't have to really get on it.

You can just see. You see with the very little effort that cleaned off really nice. And what I'm doing is I'm just trying to get that chalk off of there, that UV kinda top coat on it. It conditions it while it does it. And we're gonna finish doing the rest as any place we got to around a vent we're also gonna scrub a little more there.

That way we can see that lap seal and the silicone to see if we have any, pin holes or cracks or stuff like that. So anytime you have something like the roof antenna here or anything laying over the top of it, you also wanna bring that up, because even though it looks like it's kind of cleaned around there, once that comes up, you'll see quite a bit of, places that need to be cleaned. So, bring anything laying on the roof up or off of events, bent covers that type of stuff so you can really get at the places, that you need to clean. So one thing I noticed, as I come up from this one here, this is a spot right there I'm gonna have to watch that pretty close because I see it starting to make an indentation, in that rubber membrane. So, the more I bring this up and down the more it vibrates going down the road, the more I might get a puncture in that and a potential leak at some point.

So that's why it's good to look at every inch of this roof. So you see, it's fairly easy to do. It's a little tedious you gotta be patient on it. One of the things you'll notice too, you gotta be careful when you're walking up here, but even on this wet, I got a pretty good surface right here mostly because wearing tennis shoes with a good rubber sole on it. But even on this wet side, you can hear it streak.

So you'll see a few footprints around here still the farther you get back, the more time you spend, sometimes the quicker you do it I probably might go back and hit a couple of these but it's more for aesthetics. I mainly wanted to get it cleaned, I wanted to get the oxidation off conditioner on it, so that now it's gonna last a lot longer. And you can get an aftermarket conditioner. Some of the rough material companies will make just a plain conditioner. You can wash it, with Dawn dish soap and then and use the blue kind.

The blue is environmentally friendly. It also has a degreaser in it. And then afterwards, I can use that conditioner on the top of it. So, take care of it once a year, it is part of your warranty, to get your 10 year parts warranty on this rubber roof. And it'll make it last a lot, lot longer.