Soft Washing: You want to get your home’s exterior clean again, but you don’t want to damage your siding or surrounding landscape. Now what? Well, you can ensure you hire professionals who specialize in soft washing, which is a gentler approach to power washing that doesn’t risk damage while getting your exteriors cleaned.
Let’s go over some ways in which traditional power washing can damage your home, and why it should be handled by a professional who can do it the right way.
Power washing can…
1. Allow Water to Get Into Your House or Attic
The exterior of your home isn’t made to withstand the type of pressure that comes with a high-powered pressure washer. When you use a powerful pressure washer on your home, this can force water through window and door seals, which can soak your hardwood floors, carpet and furniture. Because water can get underneath your shingles, you may see water damage in your attic too.
2. Allow Water to Get Into Your Walls
When a house is pressure washed incorrectly, water can get into and behind your walls. A lot of commercial pressure washers use pressures starting around 1500 psi and going up to 3300 psi. When you launch water with that much pressure, it can get behind asphalt, wood, and even concrete.
If you have a wood frame home with wood siding, there is a high chance that pressure washing your house will send water into the siding that can soak through flooring, wall cavities, wiring, plaster and insulation.
3. Damage Siding or Knock it Loose
Powerful pressure washers are not kind to siding. Your siding is not completely waterproof and doesn’t hold up well when power washed incorrectly. It’s super easy to damage vinyl siding or make it come loose, which results in expensive repairs on your house. Even brick can be damaged, as high pressure water can blast away mortar that’s decades old.
4. Cause Window Damage
The seals around your windows can start to leak, leading to rot. In addition, screens can be shredded and destroyed. Those powerful blasts of water can break the double pane, too, leading to fogging between both layers of glass.
5. Remove Paint
Too much pressure can chip away at your paint, leaving you with a bigger problem than before. This can be a safety issue if your home has lead paint. Those paint chips can get scattered around the yard and mix into the soil or play areas where kids can ingest it.
Pressure washing is no doubt a very effective way to clean the exterior of your house. But if done incorrectly by yourself or an inexperienced company, it can lead to costly disasters. You may be tempted to rent a power washer to DIY the job and save money. But you could end up doing far more costly damage on your own than if you were to hire a professional.
Contact Clearview Washing
When you hire our professionals, you get peace of mind knowing we use a soft wash approach that won’t damage your exteriors, yet will remove all that built-up dirt and grime no problem. To book your appointment, contact us today at 732-462-1187.
We use less than 500 PSI for our soft washing, rinsing and cleaning applications, safe on all soft surfaces such as cedar shake siding, wood siding, vinyl siding, stucco, plants, outdoor furniture, and screens.
