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Helping You Make Your Home Your Castle |
Furniture & Furnishing & Decorations
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Deck Cleaning
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Deck cleaning is a once a year DIY project that will make the deck look like a freshly new installation and make it last longer. It is a necessary home improvement task. If you are planning to refinish the deck with deck stain it must be thoroughly cleaned first. If the deck is not cleaned properly the results can be unsightly if not destructive. Pulling out the pressure washer to pressure wash the deck is not necessarily the best approach to deck cleaning. Although the pressure washers are popular to home owners for meeting many household needs they can be destructive if not used properly.
When vinyl siding
became the norm, the pressure washer became the household
accessory to perform the annual cleaning chore. They come in many
different sizes with the various attachments for hot or cold
water washing, with or without detergents. As all tools they
must be used with caution and for their intended purpose.
The pressure
washer spray wand attachment has several different
size tips that essentially determine the output pressure
that gets the job done. Too little pressure simply won’t get
the job done at all and too much pressure can cause damage
to the wood, cement, or vinyl surfaces that you are
cleaning. Although it may be a speedy approach to get the
job done it is not the best tool to clean a wood deck unless
it is done with care, insuring that the correct nozzle is
used to avoid wood damage.
There are other alternatives to the
pressure washer such as a scrub brush or broom, a detergent
solution, and some old fashion arm work. Oxygen bleach,
green-cleaner, and some household detergents that contain a
high level of hydrogen peroxide are very good deck cleaning
detergents. I would not recommend
a laundry bleach as
it contains chlorine that does not do justice to the
environment and may damage surrounding plants and grass.
A Great DIY Guide
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