Pressure Washing Driveways - How to get Bright White

hey guys so we've been spending a lot of time over at the farm property and i've been neglecting our home a little bit over here the the driveway looks horrible it's covered in that black mold crap that you get all the time so it's time to pressure wash so i told ryan i said look there's going to be some rain moving in once you grab the pressure washer and just hit it real quick so i'm going to show you i was teaching him the best way to do this and i'll teach you guys the best way to do this now we've done tons of videos on this we have done the pool pressure washing videos we have done defense pressure washing videos we have done driveway pressure washing videos time after time after time and i'll tell you right now if you want to start a good bar fight start talking about pressure washing and using a tip versus a surface cleaner start talking about using bleach or not using bleach great way to start a bar fight everyone has their own opinion guys you do whatever you want but i'm going to tell you after years and years of doing this and actually us doing a bunch of testing on this this is the way that it works so first of all let's talk about the equipment in the description below if you're looking for something i'm talking about there will be one page and on that page i will link to everything so i'm going to talk about two pressure washers i'm talking about some tips i'm talking about some accessories i'm going to talk about all that if you go to that click on that you'll see the page and i'll have everything listed there to the exact product link so first of all let's talk about the equipment uh i have for years recommended we have got one of these smaller units down at the beach house and i've got two units here i've got the smaller unit and the full-size engine unit up here but these are simpsons and for years we have tested these and by far for the money they're just a great buy now understand simpson is a pressure washer company um dewalt is not a pressure washer company dewalt makes tools uh northern tool northern tool is not a pressure washing company they have their own brand of pressure washers well when you see companies like that guess who's usually making the pressure washers for pressure washers and private labeling form simpson simpson does a lot of private labeling for companies so if you see a private label pressure washer more than likely it's going to be a simpson that's what they do they do pressure washing so there's two units there's a small engine unit and then there's a larger engine unit they're both about the same but the sweet spot on psi and gph let's talk about that quick of course psi is the amount of pressure and the gallons per the jeep the gallons per hour is going to be the volume of water now for the average homeowner you want to buy a pressure washer where you never want more power in other words you want one that's actually pretty powerful and both of these are powerful i'll tell you right now now we've done we've got what 600 linear feet of fence and ryan has pressure watch this fence multiple times as we've done restain projects and all kinds of stuff we've done the pool we've got the pool we've got the driveway we've done barbs we've done the beach house all around the painted cement down there everything so we've put these through a lot of hell um but they are by far the best values so i'll put a link to those down there now let's talk about the surface cleaner versus a tip because that's probably the most um argued point that there is out there the surface cleaner i'll show you the surface cleaner today and the surface cleaner has a unique function to it now a lot of people are going to say i've been using a tip for 40 years and it's just fine or they're going to say i use the surface cleaner i used one of those and it left streak marks well because it's because there's a couple reasons number one you're not matching up the right pressure washer to the right surface cleaner you need to make sure it matches up and number two you need to understand how they clean in a certain pattern so when you're using a surface cleaner first of all you want to do sort of a one-third overlap one-third overlap one-third overlap and you're going like this so you're going let's say you're going vertical horizontally stop wash it off with a hose and now go back and just real lightly hit it vertically when you do that why why do you want to do that well if you're getting streaks it's because when you do your overlap you're not doing a full overlap and part of that is getting double washed and part of that is not getting double washed so that's why when people say i have streaks well it's because you need to understand when you're overlapping you're not doing a full overlap and so part of that is getting a double clean this will speed up the surface cleaner we did a test on this and we did tip versus surface cleaner and it will reduce the time that you spend pressure washing on a driveway 50 if you have a professional pressure washing company in other words someone that's actually trained that actually has gone through any kind of preparation or core study on this they will not come out use a tip on your on your cement so on your driveway and especially on your pool which is a much finer cement there's less aggregate in there it's a very smooth surface they're not going to use a tip because it'll actually score so they'll be using a surface cleaner now let's talk about why surface cleaners are so effective surface cement or concrete excuse me concrete if you look at is very porous so when you have you have these like little u's or little pores inside there well when you use a tip you're spraying in one direction and you're cleaning sort of one side of that now this happened we proved this at the down at the pool that's a painted surface there's lots of black speckles all around well we couldn't get it out we could not get those clean we could not get that off with a tip we put the pressure the surface cleaner on it it was gone like that why is that it's not due to power it's due to multiple angles so when you have a surface cleaner you have two tips two spray nozzles in it and they're actually less powerful less destructive than a tip and they actually are alternating like this so when the nozzle you have multiple points and multiple angles that are spraying at that hole versus just one spray pattern like this that's why it cleans so well and it's so effective next this will tie into the bleach versus no bleach or cleaner versus no cleaner but when you actually pressure wash you'll see this gray and you'll see this material that's real hard to sort of wash off well that's actually part of the cement it's actually part of the it's actually part of the cement not the concrete it's the actual cement that's inside of the concrete that's actually you're taking a small layer you're taking a small layer of cement or concrete off of that surface so you'll see it especially like when you clean a pool you'll see this gray sort of when you go to the edge you'll see this gray stuff going to the water well you're actually removing a small surface layer of the concrete so does putting bleach on there really helped no we've proven that we did it out here putting bleach before you clean really isn't going to do anything some people say i like to put bleach afterwards that's fine now let's talk about the mold and algae issue a lot of people say well i put bleach down because it keeps mold from coming back no it doesn't when you do a surface clean you're going to be removing all your mold spores number one number two you need to google and here's your assignment you need to google how many mold spores and every cubic yard of air that goes by you'll quickly understand that outside every cubic yard of air has fifty thousand to two hundred thousand mold spores in it so every cubic yard that goes by your driveway has mold spores tens hundreds of thousands of mold spores and every day millions and millions of mold spores are being deposited on your driveway so saying that bleach which will only last maybe a day a few hours or a day before it's gone is gonna help long term it really isn't so it just doesn't make that big of a difference if you want to put it down put it down before if you want to put it down after go ahead and put it down after i guarantee you people will say i've been spraying bleach and it just does wonders or whatever water is all you need you know anything else now if you have oil stain they do make oil eater products that you actually put it on and it actually eats and i believe it's through a microbial process it actually eats the oil and that's one of the only ways to get that out if you have rust stains i will link to a product that i use down at the beach house um we have a white picket fence and we have a well irrigation system and the inside of the picket fence turns orange why is that it's oxidizing it's the iron that's oxidizing and it turns everything orange this rust away product that i found you literally can put it in a sprayer spray it on and in 20 seconds that rust is gone it's phenomenal now a lot of people in georgia we have red clay mistake red clay stains or mineral stains for rust stains so it may not be a rust stain we have a lot of red clay stains out here now i'm going to talk about real quick let's talk about some of the components i'll show you this little green spring attachment that i always put on every pressure washer and it moves the hose about eight inches away from the engine that's real important the extension one you're gonna want a 30 inch or approximately 30 inch extension one the surface cleaner i'll show you the only surface cleaner i've used we've tested multiple surface cleaners in previous videos this one always wins and again the in the pump so anyways understand what i'm doing out here today i'm just going to shoot video as we're doing it but you have to understand when you're using a surface cleaner you're going to go back and forth nice and slow you're going to do an overlap but because you don't do a full overlap you're not double cleaning the whole point you may say oh i'm going to see it i see a streak that's true so now what you do is you pull back so you're going this way now you're just going to go back and forth this way got it makes sense so let's go forward and i'll show you this video so we're going to be the driveway is nasty we haven't pressure washed this driveway in a year and a half um you can see that there's just black crap all over it look at this even up here on the sidewalk this really needs to be done uh i normally have a pretty clean bright white driveway but let's go over first let's go over the equipment then i'll go over some tips and then we'll actually clean so the equipment there are two pressure washers that i have recommended for years and they're both simpsons one is a lightweight it uses the smaller honda engine and then of course the larger honda engine one is the 3200 psi the other one is 33 and they're both 2.5 gallons per minute both of these are perfect for the homeowner you'll never want any more pressure in fact when we run this thing i just started this thing up that wand is going to push you back that's how much power this has you don't need any more power maybe a higher gpm if you're a professional want to do a higher volume but let me go over a few things that will make your life easy number one we just use a standard zero g hose and the zero g hose is just your standard i don't use any high capacity hose however when i hook this up to my machine this is a really important part right here and again i linked it down in the description below this pushes this out a little bit and it has this little spring in it really important to get one of those no matter what pressure washer you use the next we're using the standard hose you need an extension wand so you need this 30 inch or 33 whatever size wand i'll link to it down below the next thing you want to use is you definitely want one of these these are the surface cleaners and you can see that i have put a ton of miles oh that one's plugged i got to clean it up we have put a ton of miles on these things as a matter of fact we even cleaned the dock um a few months ago we before we stained our dock at the pond we actually use this to clean the dock so these are supposed to be yellow you can see how old these are i'm guessing this is three years old and we've been abusing it we throw it in the shed we this one was actually this is at the farm was it was left outside i think too yeah well it wouldn't work one of the nozzles was plugged so basically what you have to do is you have to unscrew this little come in closer you have to unscrew this little tip here then i had to get a q-tip i got a q-tip and i got a pin until the point where i could go and i could feel air blowing out of that tiny little hole so now i got to put it back together and we can get the pressure washer yep [Music] so here we go so this is just using the surface cleaner no bleach no anything it basically strips a small layer of concrete off of here this is going to be perfectly white and bright when it dries you don't need to use anything else there's the there's a little strip there's a little strip here that we poured that bleach on we'll show you that a little bit but now we're going to clean [Music] [Music] so ryan started doing this is he wasn't overlapping enough he was inconsistent look at this all right so the the mistake that people make and what ryan was doing was is they do one swatch so if this is 15 inches they do a 15 inch strip and then they move down another 15 inches or they may overlap just an inch and what i'm saying is is if you're gonna go across steady move it down about four inches go across four inches go across four inches go across and yes you'll be hitting most of that twice but look how fast i mean this goes that was what two minutes and i did this whole area and you can see the area over there with the bleach there's no difference when this dries when we clean this off we clean that off and let it dry but look at you can see all the crap that's coming off and this is basically it's a light coat of cement that's coming off of here another thing is if you use any kind of cleaners you're also going to put that cleaner into your grass so it'll possibly kill your grass i mean you'll be able to do he'll probably be able to do this whole driveway what do you think what did we do that what did we do that in the last time about an hour yeah an hour and a half or so plus we got to do the sidewalk in the front and then eventually we have to do the sidewalks we'll do the sidewalks another day so you'll notice that ryan has a tennis ball [Applause] stuck in his grip so he doesn't have to keep squeezing it now another so let me give you another tip on this i just shut off the machine again so here's something that you'll learn after years of doing this when you start to move when you start to move this way what i want you to do is make make it a little bit like this so just a little bit tilt the head just tiny bit like this when you come back this way actually do the opposite and what it'll do is instead of those brushes fighting or dragging along the cement you'll find that they float a little bit are you saying lift up or down no it'll move when i squeeze this handle it'll actually lock in place and as it locks in place what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to i'm actually going to turn it and use that and go back and forth like this back and forth like this let me start it up and i'll show you [Music] [Applause] all right so that's a step right here that a lot of people miss we're fortunate that we don't have a bunch of sunshine today but you've got to get that crap off the cement while it's wet you got to move it off because that's everything you've taken off okay so after you got done with that and you rinsed it off first of all when you rinse it off it's not easy to rinse off that's that stuff is heavy it sticks you're actually trying to rinse concrete or cement off of this concrete and it's not easy actually what i've done in the past is i actually has a have a hose splitter and sometimes it's actually easier to take a garden hose and rinse it off with a higher gph than psi anyways so he got done with this and what do we notice on the street all right so he had some horizontal streaks and so what i showed him was that if you find that you have horizontal streaks all you have to do is just run the other way real quick just run real quick like this so right so we did it here we did this little patch here and you can see he had a couple streaks right there we just ran real quick just this way this way this way now when the girls were doing this i had the girls do this uh last year but yeah last year i did the same thing i had them go across like this and then hit it one time the other way and it comes out perfect okay so in a previous video i showed you guys where i put a splitter on the hose right here at the machine and why did i do that it's because what it what did i what did you learn from this the worst part is getting all the crap off after you've used the spinning wheel that's right so because we're using a tip the tip has a very low gph now your gph is gallons per hour so if you go to a straight hose the hose has a high gph and it just pushes this stuff right off he was out here fighting it and fighting it and fighting it and then i showed him i went and got the hose and hooked the hose up back here and he's like dude that's so much easier go ahead and spray it and show them what i mean no halfway a little more just go you'll see go ahead but it just moves it off so fast and so quick so this is a tip that you can actually split your hose and just get high volume high gph down and it'll move that stuff because yeah i mean don't forget what you're moving here is you're actually moving cement sand and cement yes there's a lot of dirt in here but you're actually taking a layer of this concrete off and what's coming off is not really the rocks that's inside but the cement that actual fine gray dust and it just moves it so much easier okay so ryan has finished the whole driveway we're gonna call it a day because it's already been a long day it's three in the afternoon but the last thing we're going to do is we're going to take pump saver and let me show you how we do this here you go around hold that forward cause i'm going to hook this up here you don't need much you don't want to put too much in basically what you want to see is just something out of here as soon as you see it coming out of here you're done okay so here's what i want you to understand after you finish pressure washing of course you want to look and see if you have any streaks and if you do have any streaks you can go back and touch it up real quick but the sun needs to pound on this concrete for several hours before it actually dries out and it turns white matter of fact so i actually the day that we did this it was actually drizzly and cloudy and rainy the next day i came out let me show you i took the drone up and i shot the driveway and man once it dries out it just turns absolutely bright white now our driveway i think our house is probably about 16 years old and um every year i have to i have to pressure wash it every single year but man it just turns absolutely bright white so this is going to teach you how to clean the driveway faster and easier every time i see one of my neighbors out there with a tip and they're out there for hours and hours and hours i'll walk over and i'll actually bring over an extension one and i'll bring over one of my my surface cleaners and i'll say look let me show you how to do this and i've actually done that uh mike over here was out there doing it i gave it to him changed his life barb over here was out here trying to do i said barb so i actually brought a whole pressure washer because she had an old one i brought one of my pressure washers and the surface cleaner over to her and she did her whole driveway and all her sidewalks last year so the surface cleaner i don't care what anyone says you can debate it all you want it's going to change your life it keeps that spray from coming up you don't have to worry even about safety glasses you can should wear them of course but there's no spray that comes up when you're on the edge of a driveway and you get all that mud in your face it's a nice soft way to do it so anyways hope this has helped don't forget i'll link to everything down below talk to you later [Music] you

Channel: How To with Doc

Views: 22,791

Keywords: pressure washing driveway, how to clean driveway, pressure wash, pressure washing, pressure washer, power washing driveway, how to pressure wash, how to pressure wash a driveway, pressure washing concrete driveway, power washing concrete driveway

Id: DDUUCTxzc2k

Length: 23min 38sec (1418 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 20 2022