A CAT pressure washer pump is a triplex plunger pump made by Cat Pumps of Minneapolis, and the whole point of it is that it comes apart — seals, valves and plungers are all replaceable parts rather than the reason you buy a new machine. That sentence is the entire argument, and it is why

A pressure washer quick connect is a spring-loaded sleeve that traps a ring of steel balls in a groove on a male plug — and that groove, not a thread, is the only thing holding 3,000 PSI together. It comes in two high-pressure sizes, 1/4 inch at the nozzle and 3/8 inch on the hose

Whether you can repair pressure washer pump damage comes down to three questions — which pump you own, which part actually failed, and whether the casting is cracked — and only one of those answers is expensive. Three failures are genuinely worth an afternoon and a kit: worn seals, worn or pitted valves, and a

A pressure wash surface cleaner is a shrouded disc containing a bar with a nozzle at each end, spun by the reaction force of its own jets — which makes it a flow device wearing a pressure device’s badge. A 15 or 16-inch head wants around 3 GPM to work as designed, and below about

A pressure washing water tank is a buffer between a tap that cannot keep up and a pump that will not wait. Size it to your machine’s GPM and how long you pull the trigger, sit it so the water level is above the pump inlet, and plumb it with an inlet line one size

Pressure washing engine bays works, but only at about a third of the pressure you would use on a driveway, with seven things bagged first, and with a cold block. Get any one of those wrong and the machine does not tell you. The car starts, the bay looks excellent, and the bill arrives three

Sodium hypochlorite for pressure washing is sold at 10% or 12.5% — roughly twice the strength of the supermarket jug — and it needs diluting down to about 1% for siding, 2 to 3% for concrete and 3 to 4% for a roof, with a surfactant mixed in so it stays on the wall long

Power washer unloader valve repair is usually a seal kit costing less than lunch, an hour on the bench, and no new pump at all. The valve is a brass body, a sliding piston, a spring, a seat and two or three O-rings. Four of those five parts are sold in a kit. The fifth

A pressure washing hose is chosen by bore first and length second: 1/4 inch handles anything up to about 3 GPM, 3/8 inch takes over above that, and the hose length you are worrying about is costing you far less pressure than the internet has told you. That second half is the part nobody believes.

A pressure washing surfactant is a wetting agent that lowers the surface tension of your mix so it spreads, wets, clings and rinses clean instead of sheeting straight off the wall into the flowerbed — and on a vertical surface it is the only reason sodium hypochlorite gets enough contact time to kill anything. Four