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House Wash Training : Aluminum and vinyl siding
Josh Wagner : Power Washing Trainer (00:00):
The next side of the house that we're soaping is our first side that has basically some mix in it of a ton of organic growth, a little bit of grease on the sidewalk. And then we have our foundation. This is another one of those areas where I said, we're going to be using that hotter mix or that hotter bucket. The one that I mixed up a little bit first. We have not only some carbon buildup all over the surfaces. If we look, we got lots of organic, it's kind of hard to see, but mainly because we're in the shade. If you focus up on the upward side, so we've got inconsistencies all over it. When we're done, this should look like a nice even pale, maybe faded white. Our foundation. This is probably going to look and off cream color as we go through it.
Josh Wagner : Power Washing Trainer (00:40):
And the same thing with our block and masonry. There should be one, even a color by the time we are done. If we focus on our trim work, if nice vinyl trim up top. We have a little bit of organic that's growing over there. And then coming back down, we have some more carbon buildup. So we're going to go ahead. And soap this up, extra attention on the bottom, we're going to start there. Soap up the foundation, soap up the sidewalk, hit the top re-soap foundation and sidewalk, and then we'll start rinsing again, just like we did out front. So we can go ahead and do that.
Josh Wagner : Power Washing Trainer (01:38):
With low pressure soap from bottom to top
All right. So basically again, we hit the sidewalk at the foundation, worked our way from the bottom up to the top and I don't know if you could see it on camera, but you could almost see the mix working across the surface. I basically started low end on that side, worked my way over and then used my shooter tip to get up top. You can see the difference in just a few minutes of letting it sit there. We are going to lightly miss this one more time, shut the machine off for about two to three minutes, and then we'll fire it back up and give it a good rinse. All of this. You should see clean perfectly even coming across the entire surface. So like I said, we're going to do one more thing on just some of the heavy spots. And then we'll go ahead and shut the machine off and let it the well,
Josh Wagner : Power Washing Trainer (02:32):
All right. So as you can see, this side turned out really, really well. What we did on that side, what was, we kind of spend a little bit of time focusing on the video. As you can see the water that I was pushing on, it wasn't necessarily pushing up the siding. It was basically cascading either across or down the siding, allowing you to see everything as it rinsed. The reason you don't want to push up against anything is all these little cracks. All these seams all across the entire surface. If I sat here, blasting water straight up, it would get water underneath. And eventually that would cause a problem. Siding is meant to stop water from coming straight down. There's no natural occurrence where water is going up the siding. It only comes down. Think about rainfall. It's hitting the siding, going straight down, not a problem.
Let dwell the rinse from an angle - not straight up
Josh Wagner : Power Washing Trainer (03:13):
You want to try to replicate that when you're doing your final rinse. The other thing we're going to talk about on this side, notice all of our exposed electrical, and on some of the other places, we can see that too. You want to always talk to the homeowner about this because you want to make sure one is this up to code? Is this something that's going to cause a problem? You don't want to be out here shooting sparks because you didn't ask very simple questions to the homeowner. Not all homeowners are going to know those answers, but the point is you're taking the extra time to talk about that, to think about that and see your solution. If the homeowner is unsure, either skip that place altogether or do it by hand, let's focus on the rest of the house and see where we're going.
Josh Wagner : Power Washing Trainer (03:45):
next. The majority of our organic growth is focused on this side, which is what we're going to be soaping up next. If we pay attention to just this side alone, we've got a lot of organic growth here. And then up in that corner, we have a lot of carbon buildup. This is really old aluminum siding on this section. Aluminum tends to break down. It tends to look ugly over time and it tends to scar easy. One of the reasons it's important to know what you're cleaning is because if you're not careful, one, you can disturb the oxidation that's present on aluminum and two, you're not always going to get those types of stains, completely clean. Being carbon-based stains. It's basically a 50 50 shot of whether or not that's going to look awesome when you're done or whether or not it's just going to look faded.
Josh Wagner : Power Washing Trainer (04:28):
The difference is how long that actually sat there, whether that staining has penetrated into the surface and actually broken down the paint or whether it's relatively new and it's just standing there. So we'll see in a few minutes, how that actually turns out. As we go around the rest of the building, there's nothing really fancy on this side. We're going to stop at the deck and make that a separate section. But basically all of this is what we're going to be soaping up next, focusing again on all of the carbon underneath of the top trim work, we have all of our organic growth all across surface. And then of course we have our foundation. So we're going to go ahead and soap this up this time. We're going to be switching over to our mild mix because this is just organic growth. There's nothing heavily porous. There's nothing extra fancy that we're going for. We're just attacking basically everything that's on the surface right here. So we're going to fire the pressure washer up and see how it comes out.
Fixing roof drips
Josh Wagner : Power Washing Trainer (05:29):
All right. So now that we've rinsed this side of the building, what we're looking at is basically everything that's kind of residual. So I asked us to kind of focus for a second on what looks like just brown, drip marks coming straight down from, ah we're going to call it. The first tier of the roof is coming down. Basically you have all that runoff that's coming and then it slowly dripping and it's leaving marks on the siding. That's perfectly fine. It's going to happen anytime you have any architectural structure that looks similar to this, it just causes a second drip. Well, the way to correct that is basically you let it dry. You let it do its thing and then come back and need to lightly mist it with the same soap, just that lower section, and then rinse it down or keep track of it while it's wet and just casually come back and just keep rinsing it. The important thing is not to forget about something like that, because once it dries, that is going to look awful on this nice clean surface.
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