Pressure washing is simple right? You buy a machine off the shelf from your favorite big box store, connect it to your hose, turn it on and you are ready to clean the entire neighborhood. Usually after a few hours of writing your name on the dirt of your driveway the novelty wears off. You scratch your head and decide to call it a day promising to finish the job tomorrow.
Weeks go by and you still haven’t finished the job. You can’t figure out how the professionals make it look so easy? Here at Matt The Driveway Guy we have been cleaning driveways since 2011. We have seen everything and cleaned everything possible to clean.
So what separates the professionals from you? How can guys do this for a business and still have time in the day? It’s simple. Professional equipment, experience and industrial chemicals. We do not use equipment that can be purchased at a big box store. We don’t buy our chemicals at them either. The majority of what you see at Lowe’s, Home Depot, Ace Hardware is junk with a fancy marketing label on it.
Your biggest problem is the size of your pressure washer. Big box stores push PSI (Pounds Square Inch) as the leading metric of cleaning power. While PSI may feel powerful and allows you to cut through the dirt and grime on your driveway it is not the most efficient way to clean. If you look closely at your residential pressure washer it will also show the GPM (Gallon Per Minute). The GPM is how much water is being pushed out by the machine and is much more important for cleaning. For cost effectiveness most machines have around 2500-3500 PSI and around 2 gallons per minute. With such low GPM it makes it very difficult to use surface cleaner attachments required for cleaning large driveways and surfaces. You will see lines and the machine wont be powerful enough to cut through the dirt and grime.
Professionals use high gallon per minute machines that require more than just a hose to run. Here at Matt The Driveway Guy we are running a 5.5 gallon per minute machine which requires a buffer water tank to provide enough water. We are able to use professional surface cleaners and equipment to blast away the toughest algae, dirt and grime. Since our machines are powerful we can efficiently clean large surface areas with ease. Not only does this make our jobs faster but it also allows us to provide you with a deeper cleaning ensuring the driveway will stay cleaner longer.
