Ever wondered what the best way to pressure wash a stucco house is? Soft wash is the answer. Tune your pressure down to no more than 500 PSI and use The Boss house wash from Dirt Killer, Hell Bender for tough spots, and SH for heavy organic growth. Be sure to wet house and shrubs thoroughly before you begin. Watch video below for more details.
How to Soft wash Stucco House : VIDEO
Softwash Stucco House Video Description:
Old Man Wags shows us how to use a pressure washer with a down stream injector to soft wash a stucco house. *Though he used a pressure washer for water delivery, the "pressure" never exceeded 500 PSI and the soft wash detergents did most of the work.
Products used:
The Boss : Eco house cleaner: https://www.dirtkiller.com/shop?search=The+Boss
Hell Bender : A strong degreaser https://www.dirtkiller.com/shop?search=hell+bender
Sodium Hypochlorite https://www.dirtkiller.com/shop?search=sodium+hypochlorite
X-Jet : https://www.dirtkiller.com/shop/product/5000404-x-jet-960
Transcript of Stucco Softwash video:
Let's kill some dirt. Hey guys, this is Old Man Wags here with Dirt Killer pressure washers. Today we are going to show you how to clean a historic home from 1928. If you look around, it is Springtime. This is the perfect time of the year for everybody to really be getting their house washed. There's a lot going on right now and we're just going to take some time to show you an instructional video and we're first going to do a walk around the house and show you what we're gonna do. So let's get started. This house is primarily stucco. There is a lot of hand carved woodwork around the entire property. We're going to try and get some zoomed in features of that. We're not gonna focus too much on it. We are gonna clean it and hopefully we'll get some good results from that.
The other areas that we're really gonna focus on is the organic growth that's all around the property. If you're kind of following us you'll be able to see that this entire building, the front is not that bad. These corners aren't that bad, but the back of it, that's where we really got some time that we got to spend on. So let's go ahead and keep walking and we'll see what else we got. So during the walkthrough, one thing I like to point out to homeowners and stuff like this, we have some vines that are growing and we have where vines used to grow. If we're kind of focused on that a little bit, this is something that's not going to come clean. It's something that's adhered to the stucco. If I put too much pressure on it, it'll either pull the paint off or it'll make it look even worse than it actually is.
Personally I do like that design, but that's real important to homeowners, homeowners that we point out stuff like that so that we're setting their expectations when cleaning the property. So like we were focusing on, there's not that much going on on this side of the building. What you can see though is the stucco versus the wood. It's our goal in this cleaning to clean the stucco as much as possible because the owner's getting ready to sell this property. But what I don't want to do is disturb any of the authenticity of say stuff like this where I'm going to call him the totem pole. There's a lot of intricate detail that you can tell when this was hand carved. The guy put a lot of time into it. I don't want to disturb any of that there is already some carpenter be damage.
This is something that I'm not going to try to strip. I'm not going to try to do anything beyond just a face lift in a general purpose cleaning, starting to move away this side of the house. We know that there was a lot more things that we need to just kind of pay attention to. There's a lot more detail over here. Not that any of it's more complicated. It's just things that I like to talk to the homeowner about. As we're moving around, you'll see that there's all kinds of fixtures that are either intentionally varnished or just varnish due to their age. And again, you want to bring that out to the customer, say, Hey, this isn't gonna get restored or anything like that cause that's a different type of service. This is something that we're going to focus on. We're going to clean it, it's still going to look good, but it's not going to look brand new.
The other thing on that side of the house is the electrical panel. Again, just talking to customers saying, is this up to code? It's a very simple question and it is basically is your way of saying, is this waterproof? That's a really important part of this industry. If there's any hesitation from the homeowner or the customer, you want to take some extra cautions in just taping up electrical outlets, taping up any loose wiring and just making sure you're not doing anything that could start a fire because believe it or not, that is a true concern in the industry. As we kind of zoom in on that door a little bit, you'll see that there's some flaky paint. That's something that, again, I'm not trying to strip it, I'm just trying to clean it. Hopefully know that's going to break loose. But it looks like it's in good enough condition.
There's also a bird's nest on top of one of the shutters. I like pointing stuff out to the customer, seeing one if they want me to actually remove it or seeing two, if they want me to just kind of skip that area and just maybe hit it with a light rinse just to get some water on it. The other thing that we'll notice is down here we have a drain. If we go ahead and focus on that. The reason I like bringing this to our customers' attention is if that storm drain isn't cleaned out and I'm flooding and cleaning this entire stairwell, I have the big possibility of flooding their basement. So again, just talking to the customer and knowing these kinds of things ahead of time can save you a lot of headache later. The next thing we're going to focus on, there's a lot of organic growth going up this stairwell that's gonna turn out real nice for us.
Some other areas that we kind of have in this back corner, we have our clay woman that's right there. Cause it's a little more delicate of a surface. Again, just using low pressure and confident that that's going to come pretty clean. We'll be happy with those results. Another thing that I kind of want to focus on in this area is this door. Do you notice it is rotting out all around it. Even up here there's a gap big enough that I can put my fingers through it. The reason I like seeing stuff like this ahead of time is because it's not uncommon for people to have something like this. And for all I know there's $1 million Ferrari in the corner. Last thing I want to be doing is spraying anything in there that's going to damage that finish. I don't know what's back there.
So I'm going to take some precaution going around this door as we kind of squat down and get a little lower. We're going to get a little personal with this later and do some wand work. If you notice it's a little loose. So we're not going to hit it with too much pressure. One of the reasons I'm not going to use a surface cleaner is just so that I don't tear anything up. We're going to lay nice hot mix down on this. Hopefully all this will come clean and you'll have basically a clean patio afterwards. If we focus on this little area right here, there's all kinds of algae and organic growth. I'm really looking forward to seeing what that's going to turn out when it's done. Last thing in this corner, we have a lot of organic growth right here. Just algae.
It's even coming off on my hand. I'm not going to put too hot of a mix on this cause again, I don't want to strip anything. I don't want to damage the wood, don't want to damage the finish. But we are gonna focus on this just a little bit. So as we kinda move through all this, we're going to focus on some other things that are kind of up in this staircase. We walk up here. There's all kinds of organic growth. Just focusing right there. There is a lot going on just in this little, we'll say staircase. One reason that we like to tell homeowners we're focusing in on organic growth. Believe it or not, this can actually impact the people inside the house. So two reasons. All this is organic algae of some kind. There's a lot of Moss. In this case there's lichen every time we got the windows open, if there's any kind of a breeze that's just dragging these spores right inside the house, kind of like it comes off when I run my finger across it, the wind can break that loose bringing inside you can get all kinds of weird allergies from it.
It can in some cases cause mold to grow inside the home. And you know, that's just kind another key selling point of what we're doing in the industry. So let's go out and we will check out this driveway in a second.
We're going through here, we're going to focus a little bit on this Archway. I want to be careful not to do any damage to these vines. We're also gonna focus on this door again because like I said, there could be $1 million Ferrari in there. I don't know. So I want to pay attention to anywhere that our mix can get through, not laying too hot of a mix. I'm not stripping this door. Just go ahead and cleaning it and then as we focus down the rest of this driveway, there's all kinds of things that we're going to do talking about hitting the actual stonework on the driveway. There is a lot of just little minor details, kind of like we talked about on the other side. One other thing that's kind of important when you're talking to customers, I like telling everyone to lock their windows.
The reason I say this is it actually when you do that, it seals them a little bit better than normal. The other thing is if there's somebody inside the house, I like telling them look out the window before you walk out that door cause I have no way of knowing when they're coming out. As we kind of focus back on the front of the house, you can see that this is going to take us the majority of the day to do. We're hopefully going to go through and get some good before and afters for ya. And this is Dirt Killer. Let's get ready to kill some dirt.
All right, so let's spend a minute just talking about some accessories that are gonna make my life easier. This is a high pressure ball valve with a built in Mosmatic swivel. What this does is it allows me to swivel under pressure. So if I'm holding this got an excessive amount of hose, all I'm doing is pulling on it. This will twist even while the machine's on, allowing my hose to stay, not looped up and basically in a straight line. Making my whole entire day easier. Next thing I'm going to use snub nose gun. He goes head and connect is nice cause I can manipulate the flow coming out that way I can essentially adjust my pressure. On the tip side, we're going to use a customized J-Rod. I'll show you what we've got on there. In a second. We have a shooter tip. We have a low pressure fan. We have a medium pressure fan, which should hit about a thousand PSI, and then we have an adjustable fan from an M5 downstream injector. We're going to go ahead and start cleaning this side of the house. Let's go get ready.
All right, so I still got to give this a heavy rinse, but you can just see a working laying a heavier concentration on there is doing the job because of how much is going on as far as the detail on the house and a lot of the framework, I'm using the lightest mix possible to do the most amount of work. That means increased dwell time and in some cases I'm going to have to hit it twice, but it's a lot better to take those kinds of precautions than it is just to flood the surface with too strong of a mix and risk doing any kind of damage to the, one we'll say organic plant life that's around or any kind of the artistic woodwork that we got got around the entire thing. The other thing that you'll notice throughout the entire house is I'm not laying a very heavy sud.
The reason for that is the heavier of a sub that I lay or the more bubbles, the more time I got to spend rinsing more, I got to spend rinsing one that's time wasted and number two, the reason is the SUD is only there to penetrate the surface. What it's doing is on a microscopic level, it is breaking down the surface tension, allowing the dirt and any film that's on the surface to just release, it's breaking that bond. Once it does its job, the sub doesn't really serve any higher purpose, so the less I got on there, the less work I got to do breaks the surface tension. The sub dissipates real fast. I'm using The Boss because I like the fact that it does that and two it leaves glass looking awesome. I, after it goes through and does the final rinse, we'll see the results and it'll just basically take everything to be as clean as possible. All right, so we just did this side of the house. I got a little bit more detail here that really needs some extra work. What we're going to do is hit it with a strong mix of Hell Bender. This is one of our original products. We're going to go head to head and hit this peak as well as the second peak over there. We'll see what it looks like. Our goal is to try to clean up some of that gray that we see. So hang tight. We'll see what it looks like.
All right, so as you can see, Hell Bender did a phenomenal job taking everything that was left on this little stoop away from the surface. We got that on both of them. What we're seeing here is as everything runs down, it cascades and lands here as it sat there, kind of stripped away some of the paint and it basically was catching everything for all the years that this house wasn't cleaned by using Hell Bender because it's a more aggressive product, I was able to pull even more of that off of the surface. And as you can see, it did a really nice job on brightening both of these up. I'm not that worried about the color difference because that caught everything. There was a drastic color difference to begin with over the next couple of weeks. This is just going to fill back up and you'll see that even out as a just time passes.
What we just did is we use an X jet to put an even stronger mix on to this area of the house because it had so much organic growth I need to up the mix a lot. I didn't bring a dedicated pump with me, so what I wanted to do is use an X jet and just put as much on the surface as I can by a downstream method. As you can see, it's already starting to work. It's only been sitting for a few minutes. We're going to give this five, maybe 10 more minutes. We're going to knock off all the heavy stuff. We're going to see if we need to downstream and again, and in a few minutes we'll have some good results for you.
Hey guys, so we're going to focus on getting this railing next. As you can see, all the lichen is gone. 90% of it did come clean, but we're going to go ahead and hit it with the original dedicated pump. This is a 50 50 mix. We're just gonna go ahead and spray this railing, touch up a few areas around the house, do a final rinse and then we'll be good to go. All right guys. We're getting ready to do our final walk around. We want to see what you think. We're going to focus on just some of the highlights that we were looking at today. If you remember, this entire thing was green and black with lichen you and algae and just all kinds of organic growth. Nothing left on it anymore. Very happy with how that turned out. As we move across the entire property, there's really nothing that you can see on this side that doesn't scre m.
This was just cleaned the whole property. We were real happy with how it turned out, including even touching up some of the areas where we talked about the vines. I was able to get some of the actual debris of the vine to leave, whereas just the stains left and were coming to the surface as we kind of focus back on the different areas, all the glass, all the bars, all the wood. I was very happy with how that turned out. It cleaned the whole lot of it. It didn't strip anything away, which again, that was our goal and kind of focusing on this. Even the door, I didn't take anything off that I didn't want to, don't mind those steps. They're just from the dog. As we kind of focus more on this side, there was a lot going on in this corner starting with those two doors, that clay pottery and even this nice stone wall or not stone wall, but nice wall that turns out that thing was pink.
Even the stairway going up real happy with how that turned out. We did have to hit this railing again with a more dedicated mix just because of how aggressive it needed to be for it to really clean everything off of it. All in all real happy with how this staircase turned out to as we can move back through the arches. They all came out great. And then we're kind of ended with the front of the house, the main driveway, and just real happy with how the doors turn out is Archway above it. And overall just real happy with the project. So we're going to go talk to the homeowner. We'd love to see what you think. Feel free to click on the link for more info. This is Old Man Wags. Let's kill some dirt. (Music) Dirt Killer. Let's Kill Some Dirt.
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