Roof cleaning chemicals come down to three families — sodium hypochlorite, sodium percarbonate (oxygen bleach) and no-rinse quaternary ammonium products — and only sodium hypochlorite is the one a roofing industry body actually endorses in writing. The other two are legitimate choices for specific reasons. Neither of those reasons is that they clean better. I
Cleaning a metal roof is a detergent job with two published ceilings: keep the water under 500 PSI and under 160 degrees Fahrenheit, mix a quarter cup of mild detergent per gallon of water, let it stand five to ten minutes, and rinse down-slope with plain water. Nothing abrasive touches the panel. Ever. Those numbers
Cleaning decks safely comes down to one number you have to look up before you pull the trigger: softwood such as cedar, pine and fir is handled at 500–600 PSI, hardwood tolerates up to roughly 1,200 PSI, and composite depends entirely on the brand — Trex publishes 3,100 PSI for current boards and none at
Cleaning mold from siding is a kill, not a scrub. A fungicidal wash has to sit on the wall long enough to oxidise a living colony, then get rinsed off gently — and none of that matters for long unless you also find out why that particular wall is still wet at lunchtime. Two houses
Soft wash siding cleaning comes down to five things your hands do: apply the solution from the bottom of the wall upward, keep every square foot visibly wet for the whole dwell, work sections small enough that you can get back to them, overlap each pass by about a third, and rinse from the top
Cleaning aluminum siding starts with a question the vinyl guides never ask: is this wall dirty, or is it chalking? Rub a dry hand across it. If your palm comes away dusted with a pale version of the house colour, the dirt is not the problem — the finish is coming apart, and every decision
Cleaning concrete with bleach works beautifully on anything that was once alive — algae, mould, mildew, lichen, moss and the grey-green film that makes a shaded path lethal in January — and does essentially nothing to oil, rust or efflorescence. On a slab, the working mix is household bleach cut roughly one part to two
Gutter cleaning winter advice reduces to one rule: clear the troughs before the first hard freeze, because once the ice is in there you cannot scoop it, the ladder has become genuinely dangerous, and the gutter was not the thing causing your ice dam anyway. That last clause is the part nobody says out loud,
Every concrete cleaning acid works by dissolving a thin layer of your slab, and the entire skill is picking one that takes the stain without taking much of the concrete with it. That is the sentence the label never prints. Acid is not a detergent that lifts dirt off a surface — it is a
Composite roof cleaning is a bucket, a mild detergent and a soft-bristle brush — not a machine. On a moulded polymer roof the colour runs all the way through the tile, so there is no granule layer to strip. The thing that actually ends warranties here is chemistry: solvents, strong oxidisers and metal, all of
