How to Pre-Wet a Surface for a Pressure Washer

Wetting down a surface before you use a pressure washer to clean it is an important step worth completing. The initial pre-wet process gets rid of loose surface debris, what's left is the hard-to-remove dirt and grime. Use these tips to prepare an area for pressure washing utilizing the pretreatment method.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Pressure washer
• Pressure washer wand
• Washer nozzles

1. Choose a wide patterned nozzle to pre-wet the entire surface for cleaning. If the area is very large, pre-treat and work in sections.

2. Stand back at least 3 feet away from the area you're spraying. This allows you to cover a large area and you aren't spraying the surface with too much pressure to start.

3. Check to make sure the pressure is set to a low level for pre-treating the area.

4. Squeeze the pressure washer wand handle gently to enake sure you're using the correct amount of pressure for the job and surface area.

5. Focus on wetting down the surface and spraying off any hanging particles. Anything that doesn't easily fall off at this point must be dealt with when you use a higher pressure nozzle during the actual cleaning process.

Tips & Warnings

• Find a 40-degree nozzle to pre-wet a surface area. It's a wide nozzle that covers most of the area at one time.
• If your pressure washer doesn't have a pressure regulator, you can regulate the pressure by changing nozzles or moving closer or further away from the surface.
• If your nozzles are color coded, red usually is the highest pressure nozzle, yellow the next, green follows, and white and black are last delivering the least amount of pressure.