The Best Chemicals For Pressure Washing (Complete Guide)

in today's video my buddy Cody is going to go through the five most important pressure washing chemicals where to get them how to sell them and how much to charge for using them and if you stick around to the end he's going to give you two additional chemicals that 90% of your competition don't even know exist so that way you can offer these Niche cleaning services to your customers but if you're looking to start a pressure washing business and you're not sure what chemicals to use how to mix them how to clean up your service on a residential job site property protection or how to set up your equipment check out the how to wash course it'll be the first link in the comment section and the description but without further Ado let's go a and jump right into the video so let's start with number one the most important chemical that everybody needs with regards to starting fresh washing business it's it's your lifeblood like it's it you've this is almost goes without saying you got to have bleach okay so bleach is what we use it is industry standard for cleaning say it with me Organics okay so when you go up and and quote jobs and driveways and roofs and you're out there quoting and bidding and you're running your website you're trying to get all these leads the lead generation is mostly going to come for organic removal and what that is is mold mildew bacteria IA algae all the things that can grow at the microbial level I'm on my back porch and it's pretty clean because I watched it like two weeks ago and I killed my TV in the process like a rookie um but all that stuff is Organics okay we cleared some land we built a building whether it's a house or whatever it is and mother nature wants to take that back and so her first wave of attack is the little stuff and that's what bleaches for it's going to kill all that stuff sanitize and it's going to just allow you to get the surface clean without using any pressure so that's why we're able to kind of soft wash low pressure is because the bleach is going to do all the work breaking down the organic material you got to have bleach you if you're run out of bleach you're done for the day one of the most important things that you teach Cody that I really love is when you say that you know it's not just going to kill the Organics on the house it'll kill the Organics on anything that it lands on so safety precaution with regards to bleaches watering vegetation and things of that nature right yeah and a lot of new guys and people coming in that you know even homeowners they're like bleach is bad you know they're freaking out about it because they don't understand that we're using on a house wash such a diluted ratio we're able to control our ratios with the metering valve with a batch Buster if you're soft washing or if you're downstreaming it's kind of automatically diluted um but yeah it's very very diluted on the house wash now as we crank up ratios and some of these other things we could clean roofs and stucco and brick things where we're cranking up past 2% yeah we got to be super careful because it don't know the difference between algae and and nasty's vinyl sighting right and the patunas out front of Miss su's house bleach don't know the difference so you got to be careful take your precautions but as long as you're following your steps I think the last uh Bush or shrub that we damag was like 200 I mean like 15 it was a long time ago so but we're very careful we're very meticulous and uh we've got steps and processes to make sure that we don't damage we only want to kill what we want want to kill we don't want any collateral damage we did have a question with regards to percentages the bleach we're putting on is diluted to a certain amount depending on what service that we are cleaning so what do you recommend to not kill plants or grass well 0% if you don't want to kill plants or grass or anything right there's not a percent that you can hit that's like okay from here down doesn't kill plants or no it doesn't work that way if it's button nak get hot outside and it hadn't rained in two weeks and you do a house wash at one and a half percent about where want to wash a house at one one to two% depending on how nasty it is anything o over zero is not good for vegetation or anything so uh the trick there is to watch your overspray right try to minimize overspray and runoff and things like that and then if you do have any overspray you just keep that stuff rinsed off and and flooded down so house wash range one and a half percent uh brick stucco you go up to about two to 3% roof cleaning we go 5 to 6% so we're changing these ratios but there's there's not a number in there where it's like plant safe you just got to do your due diligence make sure you flood everything dilution is the solution for pollution keep everything diluted now if you guys are still struggling with what percentage of bleach to use on different types of surfaces or how much bleach you need to be using be sure to check out qu iq's mixing calculator you can use it for free in the resources section of quq and I'll leave a link forward in the comment section and the description of this video and then you're going to be able to put in all the metrics you need to figure out how much bleach you need in order to cover concrete or houses or whatever the surface is that you're cleaning um the second most important chemical to talk about in today's video is surfactant and I have a jug right here Cody of Southern draw right there so Cody why is surfactant important why do we need it what services do we need it to clean all that kind of good stuff well here's where I'll I'll be uh honest okay you don't need surfactant but you need surfactant and so what do I mean by that well if you run out of soap I would never run out of surfa and like well we're done for the day we can't work anymore you can still work but the reason you need it and we'll put Big Air quotes but you do you do need it is because if you don't run any soap of some kind you're going to spend more money on the sh you're using more bleach because you're not opting to put a soap in the mix what the surfactant does is it makes the soap the the sh sticky the bleach sticky so that it'll stay on the surface and do its job if you don't right you don't put anything on there just as viscous as water so it's running off which means you got to keep recoding uh and you wind up actually spending more money on sh than you would have in total if you just put some surfactant in there so it's sticky it also increases your dwell time it's got a cover scent in there which is not necessary but it is nice and it keeps your mixture wet longer so it doesn't dry as quickly in this the summer so need you know you can get away with not using it but it doesn't make any mathematical sense to not use a surfactant because it's saving you money and look if I could wash a house if I could clean a roof with say 25 gallons of bleach if I'm doing it right and using soap and then if I don't have any surfactant and it takes 35 gallons you know not only did I go the wrong way mathematically for my spend my cost of goods but I also sprayed more bleach so the more bleach we spray the more chances of screwing up stuff at the ground level as far as vegetation so there's kind of another reason there I do want to talk a little bit about uh negatives with regards to surfactant like you know the things that could go bad because Cody some people think that I can just dump a whole bunch of Dawn dish soap and a bunch of uh you know sh or sodium hypochloride or bleach as we call it um and can you kind of talk about some of the negatives of using things that really shouldn't be used um in Bleach I can't remember who I was talking to but this was just like two or three days ago may have been a homeowner I can't remember they're like yeah we put some Dom and some bleach in there I don't know why people default to Dawn because it's like the only thing that you don't need to put in there if you take a bottle of Dawn and flip it around and read the bag it clearly says in all caps do not mix with bleach so it will create a reaction it ain't GNA probably kill you but strong a lot of Dawn and a strong mixture bleach will make a gas so you don't want to do that um don't just go grabbing crap on the the laundry aisle either there are certain laundry detergents that we've used before and had pretty good success with them but they're not none of them are going to go as far as a professional made soap that's made for sh mixture made for soft washing and the other thing is some of that stuff doesn't rinse clean okay it's made to go in the laundry in the washing machine can you use it kind yeah you can kind of use it but it's not going to rinse off of glass like our stuff will so our stuff Rines extremely well off of glass it leaves like a almost a pure finish so that's one reason I've never really got into waterfed pole stuff is because our surfacing is so freaking good it almost looks like perfectly clean glass uh so yeah there's some advantages to using a engineered soap all the Kims that we have guys Justin can can attest to this eron if he's still watching three years ago I could have picked up the phone and said hey make me a lineup of Kims I didn't do that on purpose because I didn't feel like it was the right thing to do I wanted all of our stuff to be engineered one at a time how I wanted it to perform and we own all of those Blends it's they're specifically niched down and that's why they work like they're fire some of that stuff uh we're going to talk about one here in a second that's absolutely revolutionary because it's not just hey you guys make that put my label on it and we'll sell it we don't roll like that so make sure you're using good soap it does make a difference you'll see a big difference and then you'll probably see a difference at the end of the year on how much you spent on bleach I do want to attest to how high quality this soap is you might think oh it's just a soap right that's why people think oh I could just throw Dawn in there I could just throw whatever I got in the house in there one time and I told you this Cody before but one time I I dropped basically a whole gallon of one of these in the back of my truck and to this day the truck will still Suds up and this happened like years ago so the sub is really good for anybody's hoping to get bang out of their Buck for soap and surfactin and hopefully hoping it sticks on roofs and things of that nature trust me this is top quality stuff and as Cody said formulated for rinsing off Windows that's one thing I had a house one time and I think I I think I was at the time I didn't know any better I was mixing bleach and and Dawn dishop but I hit the windows I left and I actually got a call back because the guy said hey my windows are like super spotted up so that's a you know cause for concern that's something that you can call back on um is spots on Windows right Cody yeah and all of our stuff is concentrate so that one gallon makes a bunch right it's it makes 16 gallons or 10 gallons if you want it real thick so yeah it a little bit goes a long way and you don't need a whole lot but you don't want to run with any because like like I said earlier you're just GNA be wasting bleach right so check it out Southeast off.com get yourself some surfactant I want to go back to bleach one more time Cody because I don't think a lot of people know where to get it I'm I forgot to ask this question where can we get bleach if let's say that we don't know where our local supplier is we don't know where anything is where should we go well you can go to Home Depot Lowe's Walmart and go to the pool aisle and get 10% sodium hypochloride liquid in The Jug for the pools if you're like in a pinch here's what you guys need to do if you're you know trying to find like a real vendor Google U industrial chemical vendors near me and see what comes up through that use some Google food there if you run into a dead end and you just can't figure it out uh Google a company called Univar un give them a call and tell them what you're trying to do you're pressure washer and they they're the nation's largest manufacturer of bleach so they'll be able to kind of tell you who in your region may have uh some sh like we sell it we pump it for you which is just much easier you show up we fill up your tank you pay us you leave you don't have to fool with the barrels uh but worst case scenario they'll be able able to get you somebody whether it's barrels or a fill up station you know in your region so they've got over 400 tanker trucks in the US that just haul bleach so there's bleach somewhere you just kind of got to find it um if you can't if you got a local pool supply place go and ask them you know hey where you guys get your sh because they're buying it somewhere okay perfect I just wanted to cover that because sometimes it's not very well known where you can get the best bleach and we're not talking about Clorox just off the shelf HX and everything at the laundry aisle in the store is going to be 6% five or 6% sh uh is what's typical what we're talking about industry standard is 12.5% bleach so it's double the strength of what you can get at the laundry aisle and it's actually cheaper to buy it that way because it's it's usually cheaper per gallon and it's twice the strength so it's actually cheaper cheaper cheaper so that's what you want to try to find if you can only get 10% that's fine too 10% is is still plenty strong you'll be able to dilute that down and do everything you want to do with it excellent so so far we've covered two different Kims first was bleach second was surfect and both incredibly important now hatch's already on to us he says what about gas station parking lot oil stains our next Kim will actually treat these so Cody what is the third most important chemical that we need to know if we're going to be pressure washing we were talking about making this video and uh it's it's kind of hard for me to pick a few but I think degreasing jobs is probably once you leave the Organics realm right the next biggest category of money out there for for guys that are washing is probably degreasing okay so food Grease gas stations oil change places it this is the the back side of a Burger King here so I cleaned that and you can see we sprayed Dynamite de it's a grainy photo but it's dynamite Degreaser we sprayed it and then we ran over with the Surface Cleaner so all that on the right side there is the original food grease and I love doing restaurants that reason food grease Cuts pretty easy anyway so it's always like a big wow factor Dynamite's like way overkill for food grease but I like I like Overkill um it works really really good there's another example I think that's from a sonic yeah you can see the Sonic there the little poles up there in the the corner treated all of it down now this was these are cold water like you can get really good results with uh even a cold water machine and a good concentration of dynamite Degreaser so dumpster pads gas station fuel Islands lots of places out there you can get money doing degreasing and dynamite Degreaser is it's one of if not the Degreaser in the market Cody like you mentioned wanted to prioritize things that can make guys the most amount of money Degreaser obviously a great opportunity to make some money is this could we also use Degreaser to remove oil stains from just um concrete driveways from residential absolutely yeah I'm always looking for those when I'm quoting residential because it's an upsell and even if they don't go with the upsell I still want to I want to put it out there and they got to say no to it right because then they can't try to say well you didn't glean my drive yeah I did I did but there's an old stain see I only to have that the upsell is the caveat like if they don't pick it that's fine but they don't get it you know hey you can get a combo meal or you can just get the sandwich but if you just order the sandwich you can't say nothing about no drink and Fry when you get up there because you just got the sandwich so yeah I love that covering yourself because early on in my business and I'm sure you had the same experience Cody it was like I didn't really know how to treat old stains that well I didn't really know what a rust stain was or how to treat it that well and so whenever I was like you know quoting and I I I'd be like you know I'll just try to get it up as best as I possibly can because what else do you say when you don't know how to clean it right that's right and and look you can't overpromise on degrees and jobs because concrete's porest it's been sitting on there forever it's going to always probably have a shadow there um which is one reason commercial degreasing is great because they kind of get that that it's it they don't care as much because they know that it's just a fact of their business model that Greece is going to get on the pad right we're just maintaining it and it's got to look better it's going to look a thousand times better and then in two weeks it's going to be dirty again residential you need to really explain hey I don't have magic on the truck back here like I I haven't found any magic yet but when I do this with this product it's going to look a million times better so I always try to kind of caveat my way into letting them know that I'm not going to pour you a brand new concrete pad we're going to do what we can do it's going to look better and a lot of the times it actually does look like 100 times like you would not know that oil had been there but I've also done some where I was like you know it could look could look a little bit better you just can't tell I'll show you guys one here that you know there was there was really nothing that didn't look perfect on this one that's uh you got to look real close to find a haze there so that's what we're shooting for but you got to have the Kims to be able to do that regie Bryce said Dynamite Degreaser is fire he always over under promises and overd delivers I think that's a beautiful way to do business but with that said let's get into the number four best chemical for pressure washing Cody and um Have You released the product for this one already I have last week like Wednesday well it's gonna be a great time for us to talk about tell what it is yeah that right there I don't know if you got some photos you want to throw up but let me say there we go wood wizard yeah and I hate wood cleaning but we roll out chemicals slowly I don't just like yes put something out there and it'll work and we can start selling Kims I don't I don't care about that I'd rather it be right and play the long game so this is a so there you go this is a sodium metasilicate based wood cleaner and if you guys know if you're in the know there's a couple of Kims that are really good for wood cleaning and they all sort of have a different chemical profile you got sodium per carbonate based cleaners uh sodium metasilicate based cleaners which is what wood wizard is there's there's other ones out there you can use sh for wood okay and I'm I'm not going to say you can't because for years I've said you could it's just so freaking risky because you can damage the wood fibers the pH will be all off balance on the the wood itself the the the the substrate like we're screwing it up we're furring up the wood uh the color we did of wood fence one time down in Auburn Alabama We Were Young we were rookies man and and it looked good but like an hour later it like a sheet of notebook paper like it was white so we screwed that fence up because we too hot of a mix bleach is just not good for wood so we really have never tried to do a ton of fences and decks and stuff because I just hated doing them but um now that we've got something that is quick and easy and you get a really good result out of it wood Wizards pretty fire so apply it 20 minute dwell time you know 15 20 30 minute dwell time depending on what you want to do what I would do if it's a big old long fence I just apply from one end to the other and then go check a few emails and then start back where I started at and rinse with a wand and a white tip but you don't have to get like right on it this does most of the work there's another one now it was still wet this is a completely different job that's at another location here in town once it dries you know that was a good question guys were asking like what does it look like after it dries so we went back so that's after that dried and that's what you're looking for is that natural wood color Okay that was 48 hours after we did the cleaning but going from that you know you can make anything look really good on on wood surfaces while you're there because it's wet and it looks really good so the big question is what does it look like two days later and that's what we're shooting for is that good natural wood color no busting apart of the fibers and damaging the surface like that we don't to use really any high pressure a little bit of pressure just a good rinse down yeah so this is going to open up the market for a lot of wood cleaning jobs you want to be able to clean it without having the butthole pucker factor of using sh especially on somebody's Cedar Shake house so spray it down let it dwell rinse it off and it's it's pretty amazing that sodium meta silicate guys have been using that for a couple years it's kind of like the most popular wood option and we wanted a liquid version of that so you don't have to worry about mixing it and powders and doing all that crap you just get it it's ready to use the next chemical we're going to talk about was a recent release and it's been you know making a lot of headlines Cody uh and this is a great upsell and we've talked about I think we made one video on this but tell them number five is all right number five prove wild it's it's basically magic like it it's pretty close so uh oxidation cleaning and look with some of these we're getting into restoration jobs but they're they're perfect add-ons for pressure washing so this is a green metal roof uh and it was that one there it's supposed to be green what you see and it had oxidized so much it looked tan we sprayed that on we let it dwell we literally just rinsed it off with like garden hose pressure w wild go back to that other vinyl one if you can yeah I did that yesterday so that video is on my channel we're going to be going back to do the whole house but I did me a little section yesterday I wanted to get a good clip sprayed it on and rinsed it off with a 12vt okay I ain't even use freaking pressure washer so I was there doing the job I was there like 10 minutes I sat there another 30 minutes letting it dry so I could get that after photo but man oxidation removal has never been this easy it's actually never been really even possible at this level this is Hardy plank uh siding cheaper grade of paint that oxidized we sprayed it on and we freaking rinsed it off and that's what you get so this is pretty wild we we've got a lot of guys that love oxox because it's so it's so impressive to be able to go out and restore somebody's paint you know they're ready to spend five six $7,000 on a repaint and we're go out there and for $2,200 where the oxidizing it it ain't no work we're just spraying it down rinsing it off and the homeowners getting 90 95% of what they got out of a paint job what they would have gotten out of a paint job and we're there for you know a morning and so we're able to charge a quarter to a third or you know 40% of what they were ready to pay from the homeowners perspective it's a huge savings for us it's a it's a it's a big profit margin so we love Ox KN it's it's pretty new pretty revolutionary there's nothing really like that out there so very cool kind of another thing that we talked about when we made that oxidation video Cody was uh pricing so you know Joshua said how much percentage do you up charge for restoring oxidation I believe you mentioned like it was the cost of their next best alternative right and you want to talk a little bit about that yeah you know there so like we've had customers that I got a guy I ain't GNA try to dig through my phone but he he did a $ 44100 metal roof oxidized used oxox I think he said he used about a and a half of oxn so about you know six gallons total which made a whole bunch to concentrate sprayed it down rinsed it off and it was a $4,200 check and he had a Lift Rental in there as well so you know probably 400 bucks for The Lift Rental so he cleaned up you know easily he was way over $3,500 a profit and he did it in a half a day you know like a 4 Hour Work time so you gotta think like if if I can charge them X but their next best alternative is to literally literally re-roof the house well that's a huge savings for them we had a guy in the chemical group the other day and I kind of had to you know gracefully coach him because he was complaining about buying a gwn of Oxo and come to find out he' only quoted the the homeowner like $300 I'm like dude oxidation starts with a comma in it like it's that's a that's a specialty service that you don't need to be going out there doing oxidation jobs for less than $7 $800 if you're in the middle of nowhere if you're in a real place you know it needs to be a grand or over it could be the sky is really the limit with some of this stuff because if it's a $50,000 reroof and you can deoxidize it for you know $110,000 well crap I mean who wouldn't do that so understand your your Market understand your abilities and don't shoot yourself in the foot I guarantee you're not complaining about the cost of a couple gallons of oxox if you're making you know $2,800 that morning so make sure you're charging accordingly and if you guys want to get four out of the five chemicals that we talked about in today's video check out Southeast softwash doc right Cody that's right hey we got everything you need over there we've got some other ones we didn't talk about here but gutter cleaning stuff we've got red clay stuff we've got another really cool yeah he's got the whole wall back there dudes this one is cool here's an example this is a customer photo he used mud Mayday here uh this was in the Inner Circle a couple days ago I just screenshotted it mud Mayday and cleaned up that driveway looks freaking amazing look at that $2,000 job okay so he probably used you know Le less than a case for sure of mud Mayday and dude made two grand like what you gonna say to that it's hard to beat man it's it's really fun too this is a new one as well the wood cleaning Kim and this one is Monumental so for all of your uh Stone Surfaces monuments tombstones government buildings this is a spray and walkway deal we just sprayed the baby Jesus down and left and uh cleaned it up looks amazing 10 days later so very cool that's a new product for us as well so we've got uh a complete lineup whatever you need we probably have it Cody thanks so much for joining us on today's video you guys check out the links in the comment section description and until next time H hard and get that money baby peace

Channel: Forever Self Employed

Views: 135,695

Keywords: pressure washing chemicals for vinyl siding, pressure washing chemicals guide, pressure washing chemicals mix, pressure washing chemicals for driveway, pressure washing chemicals uk, best pressure washing chemicals, best pressure washing chemicals for concrete, eco friendly pressure washing chemicals, best pressure washing chemicals for vinyl siding, best chemicals for pressure washing, best chemicals for power washing, best chemicals to use for pressure washing

Id: P-YlI3jXI9E

Length: 24min 51sec (1491 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2023