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Pressure Washing vs. Soft Washing – Everything You Need To Know

A customer hires a pressure washing contractor to clean their home or business but doesn’t want to worry about damaging anything. What do they do? The easy answer is to hire a company that understands the difference between pressure washing and soft washing!

There are many misconceptions folks have about the difference between pressure washing and soft washing. In this short article, I will distinguish between the two methods and clarify when each is warranted.

Before soft washing came along, contractors would lean a ladder on a house and use high pressure to knock off mold, mildew, and algae. This strategy has a few problems, the obvious one being safety. Ladders are dangerous enough by themselves so adding recoil from the pressure washer compounds the safety issue. Additionally, when high pressure is beaming on vinyl siding, it destroys the UV coating that manufacturers put on to protect it from the sun, causing the chalky-looking oxidation that we see in some houses. Lastly, using straight pressure takes a lot of time. Imagine how long it’d take you to wash your car if you were to pass by every square inch with a stream of water the same size. That’d take all weekend! Instead, you will likely scrub it with soap and rinse it off, maybe using slightly more pressure or elbow grease when needed.

This is where soft washing comes in. When we clean a house, we utilize the soft washing technique by applying our solution to the house and then coming back to rinse. Ready for the kicker – We still use a pressure washer to “soft wash”, because with different tips, we can achieve high flow and low pressure or vice versa. When cleaning a house, we use the former and it allows us to evenly coat the whole house with our solution and come back to rinse, much like washing a car. Soft washing a house is much more effective, efficient, and safe.

Hard surfaces such as concrete and brick are when we pivot to higher pressure and less flow (more narrow tips). Using industrial-grade equipment helps us to clean these surfaces quickly without harm to the hard surfaces.

For roof cleaning, we use an electric pump to soft wash which allows us to apply a solution with low pressure (60 psi) to ensure there is no damage to the shingles. Lightly applying a concentrated solution and letting it work to remove black streaks is the niche that our electric pump fills and the solution our customers love.

Pounds per square inch (PSI) multiplied by gallons per minute (GPM) = cleaning units. In this formula, PSI represents pressure and GPM represents flow. This equation is a fundamental concept that all great pressure washing contractors can tweak to get their desired cleaning method. Understanding when to use pressure vs flow, what types of solutions to use, and how to take care of a customer's property are all crucial knowledge when servicing a property.

Home Bright Power Washing specializes in pressure washing and soft washing when it comes to commercial or residential projects. Our equipment is tailored to deliver excellent results, and the experience and knowledge that we possess set us up to do a great job at a reasonable price.