Can you pressure wash a rug? Only if it is a synthetic outdoor rug with a woven backing, and only at the lowest pressure your machine will produce — most other rugs come out of it worse than they went in. Wool felts. Jute browns. Cheap indoor rugs come apart at the glue line. And
Power washing chemicals come in four working families — sodium hypochlorite for anything that is alive, surfactants to make it stick, alkaline degreasers for oil, and acids for rust and mineral staining — and reaching for the wrong family is the single most common reason a surface stays dirty at 3,000 PSI. Here is the
Power washing siding safely comes down to two decisions: matching the pressure to the material — around 1,300–1,600 PSI on vinyl with a 25- or 40-degree tip — and holding the spray level or slightly downward instead of aiming it up under the courses. The second decision matters more than the first, and almost nobody
When a pressure washer has no pressure at all but water is still coming out of the wand, the pump is almost never the problem. You have a machine that is moving water perfectly well and failing to put any force behind it, and that is a different fault from a weak machine. Work it
Pressure washer pump oil is non-detergent oil, and that one word is the entire difference between the bottle you should be using and the motor oil already sitting on your shelf. Put motor oil in a pump and it will run. It will also hold every drop of water that gets past the seals in
The phrase “pressure washer relief valve” covers two completely different parts: a thermal relief valve, which dumps hot water out of the pump before it cooks the seals, and a pressure relief valve, which opens when system pressure spikes past a set limit. They fail differently, they cost differently, and they are mounted in different
What PSI is a good pressure washer? A good figure is 1,300-2,000 for an electric homeowner machine, 2,000-3,200 for a gas homeowner machine and 3,200-4,400 for prosumer gear — but “good” is a property of the whole spec sheet, not of that one number. That distinction is the entire point of this page. If you
The short version of how to pressure wash a driveway: sweep it dry, pre-treat the stains, coat the whole slab in concrete detergent and let it dwell for five to ten minutes, then rinse downhill in overlapping passes with a surface cleaner — or a 25-degree tip held 8 to 12 inches up if you
Pressure washer pumps come in three families — wobble plate, axial cam and triplex plunger — and which one is bolted to your machine decides whether it lasts two seasons or ten, regardless of the PSI printed on the box. Wobble and axial pumps are sealed units that get replaced when they fail. Triplex pumps
Pressure washer hose fittings come in exactly four thread standards you are likely to meet — M22 x 1.5, 3/8″ NPT, 1/4″ NPT and 3/4″ garden hose thread — and the most common leak on a home machine is two M22 fittings that look identical and are one millimetre apart. That millimetre is the whole
