Pressure Washing When Painting an Exterior Wall

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Grady Johnson I'm a professional painter and today I'm representing expertvillage.com. Now I'd like to talk a little bit about pressure washers. I do recommend before you do any exterior painting that you do pressure wash. Now, when selecting a pressure washer there are a few things you want to look for. You want to make sure you have enough pressure to do the job, but you don't want so much that it's actually going to destroy the surface you're trying to paint. Now, when you're doing painting, remember pressure washers are not only for painting, so be sure you're buying the right kind. To use pressure washers, there are a couple of different kinds, they range from anywhere from 500 PSI, that's pounds per square inch, all the way up to 6,000 PSI and even higher for some commercial units. Now, you will find that you don't need that much pressure, you're going to want around 1,000 to 2,000 PSI to do your job. Now, if you have something like a small end sort of a thing, you're going to find these are usually electric. This is the first type of pressure washer, you plug that into the wall and then you'll find that the hose will fit here in the back and then you'll put cold water into it and you'll have pressure. Now, you'll find these are going to be pretty low pressure between 500 to 1500 PSI, that's pounds per square inch. When you're doing painting you're going to want a little more than that, usually about a 1,000 at least upward to about a 3,000 to be able to the job. Gas powered pressure washers are the best, you can keep a steady pressure flow with them and they also will go up in higher PSI. These will go up to 6,000 PSI, but you certainly don't want anything that strong for this kind of job. Try to get something between 1,000 to 3,000 PSI, if you're over 2,000 you better get pretty far away from your work. Remember if you blow this thing too hard and you blow out the wood, then you're going to be getting into some carpentry. However, you do want to have something strong enough to be able to take off that chipped up paint and that's what you'll be able to do when you get something around 2,000 PSI, 3,000 PSI. You're going to find a unit that will actually take that peeling paint off for you. Both pressure washers have a stinger if you want to add chlorine, we won't be doing that today, but sometimes you want to be able to kill any mildew you might have. So these are the two basic kind of pressure washers, one is electric and the other one is gas and these are the things you need to know when you're looking for pressure washers."