Without the right cleaning compounds, a home is never going to get fully clean. According to Fond du Lac pressure washing expert Ward Hinz of SparkleWash at the Stretch, many people try to compensate for a lack of cleaning compounds by increasing the pressure they use on their homes. This is a big mistake.
Whether a person is washing dishes, clothes, a car, or the siding of a house, the fact remains that a certain amount of soap is necessary to do the job well. If a person tries to pressure wash a car without using any soap, for example, it is just not going to get as clean as if he had used the right cleaning product. This same rule of thumb applies when people in Fond du Lac are pressure washing their homes, as well.
Dirt is held onto vinyl siding electro-statically, which means a person has to break the electrostatic bond between the dirt and the surface to get it completely clean. One of the best ways to break that bond is by using the correct cleaning compounds for whatever type of dirt and surface is being cleaned.
When it comes to pressurized water, Hinz says it can be helpful to think about it as a matter of degree. The water coming out of a kitchen sink has virtually no pressure to it at all, and yet even that is enough to rinse spaghetti sauce off of a plate. If the spaghetti sauce is dried, then a person will have to increase the water pressure or the agitation to get the sauce off. The trick, according to Hinz, is to determine the right kind of chemical and the right amount of pressure based on the particular job at hand. For a roof cleaning in Fond du Lac, a person would generally need a different amount of pressure than for a car wash, explains Hinz.
At SparkleWash at the Stretch, Hinz relies mostly on a high water volume rather than a high-pressure washer when pressure washing in Fond du Lac. A person with no experience with pressure washing will go into a store and ask to buy the biggest pressure washer he can find. That may be a 4,000 PSI pressure washer, says Hinz. What that person probably doesn’t realize, however, is that the 4,000 PSI pressure washer may only be putting out a gallon of water.
Hinz says he would must rather use a 1,000 PSI pressure washer with five gallons of water. This machine would clean circles around the 4,000 PSI machine, because the effectiveness of a pressure washer depends much more on the water volume than the PSI or pounds per square inch.