I’ve soft washed many many houses with little problem, it’s always rinsed perfectly and left it looking great. Last week I have a job with dark siding and mistakenly set the proportioner to too much sh (12.5%) and when it rinsed off it looked fine but when it dried it looks terrible. I’ve tried reapplying at lower concentrations, scrubbing, degreasers, and a magic eraser. Nothing seems to help. The water I’m using is very iron rich from a well (if that matters?). It’s vinyl siding and is about 3 years old.
Any ideas how to get this to its original state? I’d rather not have that phone call with my insurance agent. From other threads I’ve heard of guys using F-13 gutter grenade as a final resort. Any help is appreciated.
It looks like the chemical might have gotten up under the siding and then dripped out and dried after you finished rinsing. I hate to say it but it looks pretty wrecked to me.
The whole house is like this in varying degrees of severity. I did thoroughly wet down before applying any mix and very thoroughly rinsed it. I was using dawn mixed with it. At the very maximum there could only have been 25% bleach by volume, I dilute it 1:1 in my bleach tank and then with the bleach valve open all the way (which mistakenly was) it draws at the same rate as my buffer tank. I will be back early next week to run some more tests on it— but preliminary peer speculation doesn’t bode well for me haha. Thanks for any help.
Use proper chemicals and equipment. Dawn is made to take grease off of dishes. It does the same thing to vinyl. You shocked it wirh way to much bleach. Call em up and tell them you will be replacing their siding. Sounds like you are using a 12v or air systemm I’d switch over to 8 gpm machines and avoid the chance of to much bleach again
Was it hot and sunny out the day you washed? The chems could have dried to wall.
I would try washing it again but make sure wall is thoroughly wet and the wall is cool so the chems don’t stick to it. Downstream chems at 1/3 SH to 2/3 water. I use Elemonator but I have used dawn when I started. Put your soap in your mix. Do small sections and don’t let it dry. We had something similar happen on a 95 degree day this year. I rewashed it and it came out great.
Have you tried brushing it with chems? Some stains (e.g. tiger stripes on gutters) just have to get brushed. F13 is some great stuff. Worth a shot. Then when that doesn’t work, go with Innocentbystander’s suggestion.
It was reasonably hot that day, probably in the high 80s. The worst spots are on the west side of the house where the sun was hitting it in the afternoon. With any luck I’ll have some cooler cloud cover next week. I’ll give reapplying it with bleach a shot.
I’ve tried brushing it with Spray 9 (which I’ve used for tiger stripes in the past) to no avail. I have a bucket of f-13 on its way, I hope it will do something.
I’m not ruling out “murdered everything with copious amounts of bleach”, but that being said, I do use an 8gpm machine. And Dawn seems to work fine as a surfactant to me, as long as there isn’t too much mixed in and your rinsing until you die haha.
I’m no rocket doctor, but maybe this is one of those times you shoulda spent the rest of the day rinsing dawn out. I was joking above but the way elemonator rinses is like a dream come true. This really does look like dawn pulled the bleach into the nooks and crannies. Capillary effect and ran out when your back was turned.
Sun. Dawn. Strong SH. Molotov cocktail man.
It’s probably time to call your insurance guy or cover the cost of the siding. Sucks, but if you’ve tried all the methods and it’s not budging…
From my limited window cleaning experience, I’ve used 0000 steel wool to take haze and water spots off glass without scratching it as well as clean up funky vinyl frames without damage. If you’re gonna have to replace it anyway might be worth a shot?
That, in addition to my current predicament, is enough to convince me.
Are you of the opinion it was the dawn that was the root cause to this? Or simply too much SH concentration?
I’d very much like to know the chemistry behind this reaction, but I seem to be at a loss. What baffles me is how much I rinsed this place— a ridiculous amount of rinsing took place! Yet still, the siding looks decimated. Off to pressuretek I go haha.
Well, we carry insurance for a reason I suppose. I’m going to pull all the stops out though. I’ll see what a hearty helping of f-13 does or maybe some lye based cleaner.
You know how you can wash one side of the house and move onto the other three when you come back to the 1st side stuff has run out from underneath the siding? Like I said above, sun, brutal concentration of SH held in the dawn.
The surfactant’s (dawn, elemonator) purpose is to hold the SH up there. Not news to you, I know, but dawn is tough x3 to get rinsed off well. I promise you Elemonator works better than dawn and rinses twice as fast. If you hate Elemonator and wanna go back to dawn, I don’t know what kind of guarantee PressureTek offers, but I’ll personally send you $50 to buy as much dawn and 0000 steel wool as your heart desires.
I ordered some elemonator a few days ago to try out. 1 oz per gallon downstreamed, and .5 oz per gallon direct application is what the instructions say. Anyone do it differently? Looking forward to trying it out after all the good reviews.
