A lot of people ask, what is soft wash? Why is soft wash different from just regular pressure washing? I guess I can tell the story
when I started in 1986, 16 years old and I started pressure washing. I knew how to pressure wash just fine. Four years later soft
washing started to become a thing people would talk about. I would tell them, sure, I can soft wash. I’ll just take the injector tip from my pressure washer and put it in some bleach. I’m adding bleach, I’m soft washing, everything’s fine. It is a 60 to 1 ratio. You’re taking 3% bleach, household bleach and you’re diluting it with 60 parts water. One part of 3% bleach to 60 parts water. Basically it’s enough bleach to make the house smell like you put bleach on it. It’s not really doing
much of anything. The pressure wash and the pressure is still what’s cleaning the house. Soft washing is 100%
completely different. Soft washing, you’re using about a hundred PSI of pressure which is maybe
2 to 3 times the pressure of your garden hose, nowhere near the 3,000 PSI that you’re using for pressure washing. First of all, you can damage the house with it because there’s not nearly enough pressure to hurt anything. Secondly, you’re not using household bleach. You’re using chlorine and a fungicide. They’re mixed at just the right ratio based on what we’re doing to clean. If we’re going to be cleaning siding for instance, we use a significantly lower amount of chlorine. If we’re gonna be putting it on a roof, use a lot more chlorine. The fungicide, that’s the magic trick. The fungicide gets introduced into the system at the very last second. Fungicide stays on the surface. When you spray this on, you’re cleaning and essentially you’re using the chlorine to clean the building. The fungicide residue stays on the building so the mold doesn’t start to grow back for at least 18 months. If you pressure wash, as soon as you’re done the mold starts to grow back. Literally the next day mold starts to grow back. You may not see
it for a year, a year and a half but believe me, the next day that mold starts to grow back. There’s no fungicide, there’s nothing on there to prevent it from coming back. That’s how it works. The next thing you’re gonna ask is, how can you spray bleach
on my house and not kill my plans or ruin my house? Because chlorine and bleach, essentially the same thing, chlorine is a stronger concentration than the regular household bleach. The trick is to not kill the plants. When we get to the job
site the first thing we do is overwater all the plants. While one guy’s setting up, the other guy is watering all the plants. He’s also putting a neutralizing agent on the leaves of the plants. This way the plants have drunk everything they need. They’ve been slightly fertilized and they’ve got a neutralizing agent on the leaves. When we spray the chlorine on the house to clean everything, whatever gets down into the plants will not hurt the plants because they’re not drinking it up and it’s not gonna
burn their leaves. It takes a very short period of time for that chlorine to become neutralized once it gets into the soil. Then when we’re done washing and cleaning the house, we go back around with something we call plant wash, which is essentially
a neutralizing agent that cleans any of the, if there’s excess chlorine on the leaves, it cleans that off, neutralizes it. We also fertilize the plants a little bit more with the plant wash. The plant stays alive, the building stays clean, there’s a fungicide
on the surface so that it stays clean for months and sometimes years to come. If we’re doing a roof, we
use a higher concentration. A roof may last, three, four, five years. If we’re doing smooth siding, it will last an
additional 18 months before the mold starts to grow back. That’s basically the difference between soft washing and
pressure washing. When we are going to do a paint job we may soft wash the house. But if we’re going to paint, any areas that are
going to get painted they always get pressure wash and we don’t put the fungicide on the surface so that it doesn’t
interact with the paint. We’ll do maybe, we’ll soft wash the house and then we’ll come back and do a hard rinse over the areas that
are gonna be painted. If the whole house is being painted we won’t soft wash at all. We’ll do it the good old fashioned way with a lot of high pressure because we want to blow off any of the loose paint and loose chips and any of the debris that’s on there that
really needs to come off. It’s not just a matter of cleaning off mold or dirt or mildew. That’s basically the difference between soft washing and pressure washing, and when you should do which. We do both by the way. If you’d like more information or for a free estimate, feel free to give us a call at 856-455-5257.