I have never read anything about this until tonight. Say you are doing a house wash and the customer is inside… they or someone in the house takes a shower or does a load of laundry. This will effect the GPM and/or pressure coming out of the water spigot that is connected to your pressure washer. This can cause your pump to work harder than it needs to.
Is there anything you can do to avoid this situation besides nicely informing your customers not to take a shower or do laundry while the house wash is going on because it can cause the pressure washer to not get good water flow thus a lousy house wash?
Weird… I have literally never heard or read about this until tonight and it seems to make sense. I did the search engine and I did find ONE post where someone mentioned this.
EDIT: I have a direct drive 4gpm machine. No buffer tank. No room in my SUV. Gotta start somewhere but plan on getting a trailer down the road once I have money coming in.
95% of the guys here run their machines off a buffer tank, for this very reason. It’s not talked about very often, because it is just a fundamental part of a professional power washing setup.
Do a bucket test on every job until you get your buffer tank setup, to ensure you’ve got more than 4gpm of flow. If the spigot puts out less than 5.5 gpm, explicitly explain to the customer not to use their water while you are washing. Put it in your pre-service checklist, and remind them when you get on site.
If you don’t have enough flow to the pump . It won’t make your machine work harder it will cavitate your pump. This will smoke your pump in a few different ways . I would advise your customers before you start working. At least until you can upgrade
Shut down machine. Re-do bucket test to confirm that’s your problem, and that your machine isn’t just acting up.
From there, I’m not sure what I would do. Probably knock on the door, but not so loudly that they think it’s the police or some kind of emergency and rush to the door in a towel, lol.
-Refrain from showering, doing laundry, or running dish washer while house wash is being completed. Doing so will cause a sudden drop in water pressure making pressure washing equipment not work at its full capacity resulting in a poor quality house wash.
It might be the sleep debt talking, but I rolled my eyes and chuckled at the first few words, “Refrain from showering…”
I think if you changed the wording around a bit, it could be simplified and more straightforward. But I don’t have the brainpower at the moment to help with that.
I washed about 100 houses last year with a 4gpm machine with no buffer tank. Only one house was on a well…I never did do a bucket test either…I was new and didn’t know. No damage to the pump…it does depend on where you live but most houses will put out 4-6gpm. But all it takes is one house putting out 3-4gpm and people doing laundry/shower…and your pump is done. As stated above…adding anything like “don’t take a shower during house wash” looks totally unprofessional bro.
I had a job in this retirement community, al these small tight packed houses, I had a machine similar to yours.
I was doing some flat work with a SF, everything was going fine then all of a sudden my SF starts to slow down a LOT. So I went to check everything out. Everything checked out, started again was good for 20 seconds then slowed down again.
I went to the customer and said I had an issue with my machinery and would have to go get it checked out, right then she asked if her putting the washing machine on may have anything to do with it, I said I dunno, lets see, so she shut it off and I tried again and it worked fine. Apparently these houses had a limit on the GPM flowing and the laundry was closer to the source than the external tap so the washing got all the water.
