Exploring Landscape Setups

How To Spring-Clean Your Home's Exterior With A Pressure Washer

24 January 2018 by Tanya Green

With spring quickly approaching, it will be time to begin gardening and mowing the lawn before you know it. As winter's snow and ice melts, it can leave behind dirt and residue from ice melt products and any debris the snow covered up. Here are some tips to help you use a pressure washer to clean off areas around your home to prepare it for warmer months.

Clean Surfaces

The driveway, sidewalk, siding on your home, porch, and other areas surrounded by bedding plants and other vegetation will need to be cleaned of winter build-up, but without using cleaners and chemicals that can damage or kill your plants. Residential pressure washing provides the perfect solution to completely clean these nearby surfaces without the use of detergents, bleach, and other vegetation-harmful products. A pressure washer with a low-, medium-, or high-pressure tip will spray water with such force it removes dirt, mold, and insect stains from your home's siding, and the runoff will only be water.

Use the high-pressure tip to spray off your concrete surfaces to remove discoloration that can occur from ice melt products and a build-up of roadway tar from vehicle traffic. Be careful not to spray any bushes, plants, and other vegetation in your landscaping areas, as the forceful spray of the water will strip leaves and bark and can damage your vegetation.

Clean Out Gutters

When you have a number of trees in your yard, it can cause excessive build-up of debris in your roof's gutters. When leaves, twigs, and dirt combine with water in the bottoms of the gutters, it forms a crust within the gutters that you need to scrape from them. Use your pressure washer to dislodge and remove this build-up from inside the gutters from your roof top.

Be sure you take care when climbing upon your roof by completing the project in dry weather while wearing slip-resistant shoes. Then, be careful you don't spray your roof's shingles with the pressure washer, which could cause damage the roof's surface.

Prepare Pavement Repairs

As part of your yard's spring maintenance may be patching any cracked or damaged concrete or asphalt pavement. You will need to clean out the cracks of any dead vegetation and debris before patching them with the appropriate concrete or asphalt patching product. Use your pressure washer to remove the debris from the interior of the cracks, spraying it off your paved surface and into nearby vegetation bedding or your lawn.

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