What is pressure washing?
Pressure washing is a technique used to clean in depth the exterior walls of any building, be it residential, commercial, institutional or even industrial. Pressure washing is done on any surface (stucco, brick, concrete, PVC, wood, iron, aluminum, cement, rough plaster, aggregate, stone, etc.) and with a specially conceived gun.
What’s a pressure washing gun?
A pressure washing gun looks a bit like spray paint gun, except the liquid (water and cleaning product) is very hot and is sprayed with a much higher pressure.
The pressure washing gun used by our team has a pressure that goes up to 4000 pounds per square inch (PSI). this means that when we use the maximum pressure, we use 7 gallons of water per minute! Thus the spray is very powerful.
What’s the use of pressure washing?
It’s useful to clean thoroughly the exterior walls of a building before painting them in order to increase the paint adherence on the surface and to extend the paint coat durability.
This tool allows us to not only clean wooden walls but also to strip metal. The pressure is adjustable: on a fragile surface, we use a pressure that is lower so to not damage it while on a metal surface we use the maximum pressure. Sometimes, it’s useful to also heat the water solution before using the pressure machine to be able to clean some stains.
Pressure washing removes dirt, sand, talc, graffiti, mold, mud, grease, black stains, yellow stains from aluminum or acid rains, and more. Depending on the nature of the dirt, we can choose to heat or not the water used for a wash, and we can also add to the water an eco-friendly degreaser, a mold remover or any other cleaner.
Pressure washing is good for smog
In the city of Montreal, we recommend to pressure wash all exterior surfaces before painting them. Given the high level of pollution, smog and acid rains, a dusty residue quickly forms on the exterior walls of buildings. Obviously, this interferes with the adherence of the surface and the paint durability.
To learn more about our pressure washing services or to request our team for exterior painting projects, click here.
Dave Beaupre
Master-painter
