Build a 42 gpm pressure washing unit?

Garages and massive flat work. That fella Jim Gamble claims to use gpms in this range and there are videos on youtube of guys cleaning gas stations with 17 gpm machines in record time. At the time they’re doing it in they could do 5 or 6 a night and gas stations may actually be profitable.

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I’ve seen that but also noticed no reclaim. Would take a hell of a reclaim unit to grab that many gpm.

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When power plants have maintenance outages they bring in a company to wash down the boiler, back pass, etc to get rid of some of the fly ash before we go in to make repairs. There’s also hard burned coal called clinkers they try and knock down. The boiler firebox is about the size of a 10 story building so they start up top and work their way down. I never really paid a whole lot of attention but kind of interested in what all they use now. There are big ole’ pumps and diesel engines mounted on semi trailers. I think they bring like 4 semi’s in. They mount the gun to frame of the boiler doors on a sort of bipod type of rig. I wanna say it’s maybe a 1.5" hose supplying the gun. Some of these “clinkers” hanging on the side of the boiler are the size of cars and, as hard as concrete, so I think they would have to use decent pressure. They’ll even sometimes bring in another crew to blast them off with dynamite. We’ll even take shotguns to them too.

We have a job coming up soon so I’ll try and sneak some pictures of the setup they’re using.

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Not 42 gpm but I could easily see it going bigger. I think on something like this it may be best to buy something already built. I know IBS won’t like this having a Siamese kit but maybe being Udor pumps will help :wink: took me 20 minutes looking through my YouTube history to find this thing…

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Jesus lord that’s a machine.

Interesting discussion. Maybe I’ll just hook a pump up to my car engine lol.

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I think some type of PTO would be worth looking into if you’re needing more than 30hp or so.

There’s a company called Butler that makes PTO-driven, van mounted carpet cleaning systems. I’ve had a lingering fantasy of buying a used Butler van and outfitting it as a pressure washing rig.

I’m pretty sure you can vary the speed of the PTO in those vans, so you could adjust your flow rate without the usual headaches of overheating or stalling your small engine at lower speed, or having to swap pulleys.

So mount a massive pump in there, and adjust the flow rate for the application. Just doing housewashing? Idle the pump down to 8gpm or so. Doing garages or gas stations? Crank it up to 20gpm, and pull out the half inch hose that you keep on a separate reel. Tow your reclaim/recycle trailer behind for the big jobs.

Or mount multiple 8gpm pumps with clutches to the PTO, so you can have a flexible multi-gun setup.

Any idea what that setup costs?

None whatsoever. If I had to guess probably 55k plus. I know what the ones I’ve looked at run and that’s 10x the engine.
Now that I think about it. Maybe not quite that high having no recovery unit or any kind of water purification yet. But you would definitely need it for what that machine is needed for.

42 gpm, 10,000 psi with a red tip!

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https://www.hydrochem.com/

Wastewater is a SE Texas/SW Louisiana company, but Hydrochem is national… they merged with PSC, who is an acquisition of Fluor that is now called/ or also called P2S… blah, blah, blah… anyway…

Hydrochem would be the guys to talk to about high pressure, high flow, supply, and reclamation. They are definitely an industrial group, but they have knowledge of equipment in high gpm range we are talking about here. This could possibly be the group that @marinegrunt is talking about. We have used Hydrochem to water cut Cat Cracker shell walls at around 3-6" thick, and they are used in turnaround services to clean exchanger bundles, tanks, and various other equipment.

http://www.rainforrent.com/ is a widely used company for water supply and reclamation in industrial settings. We use them for very large volume water supply (21,000 gallon frac tanks), pumping, and filtration.

There is a lot of very general info on their sites, and might just create more questions than answers lol… but this is the type of equipment I think of when thinking high volume/pressure… and high dollars.

image

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Check out hydrocutting with hydrochem… 2.5 gpm @40,000psi

I’m sure we’re talking about similar companies. I’ve heard of PSC. I think around here we they mainly use North American Service Group. I tried finding a picture of the semi trailer mounted pumps but it’s not a very good one. I’ll post it below.

From what I read they use 2,200 hp engines, 1200 gpm, and about 10k psi for their high volume washing. I’m sure they adjust as needed. I think they usually have about 4 or so trailers on each job. These are power plants so they have access to as much water as they need. The power plant we are working at soon has like 4 12’ water supply lines coming from a lake. I’m sure there are a lot of smaller pipes too.

It’s crazy they can hit 40k psi! I’m surprised the military doesn’t use it as a weapon!

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You could always subcontract with the city doing this type of cleaning!

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That’s insane and also impressive.

That’s a more cost efficient way of dealing with a non peaceful protest than what we do here in the U.S. Here we let them burn down the city and the taxpayers have to pay to fix the damages. It’s ridiculous. I call for using a pressure truck like that when people start destroying property that’s not theirs. Maybe not quite so strong but enough to send them running and not wanting to come back. Then again, one time with the truck above and all it would take is hearing the engine from blocks to send you running!

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I call shotgun!

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I don’t condone petrol powered pumps because of the emissions, but if I pretend to be a trump supporter for a moment I can help out:

Y’all gunna need a 3fiddy Chevy motor with a home brew supercharger… and about two shots of nitrous If yall really wanna hit the cobwebs on the 6th story of ‘ol Jenny sues pappys House

Easy @Steve.

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Saying tuna fish is like saying hamburger cow or chicken bird. Literally about the only pet peave i have lol

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I love barbecue chicken bird!

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Please, continue to insult this country that I’ve never been to!

F$ck Australia! Ya hear that @Briswash

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