Call a local competitor that does a lot of work and ask them where they are buying their 12.5% SH.
If that doesn’t work call your local water/sewage treatment plant and find out who they buy theirs from. Their supplier may not want to mess with you buying 20 gal at a time but it is worth a shot.
Someone within 50 miles of you gets thousands of gallons a week for water treatment. Find them.
@William_Neptune01 Thank you for that. It’s been suggested before that I do just that. I spoke with TDC on here and he offered me some of his 12.5+%, but that from where he is purchasing it they wouldn’t sell to someone as small as me. I feel that he is very fair on his pricing, but I had never tried the 10% off the shelf at Walmart so I thought I’d give it a shot. I also checked with a local guy I ran into at the gas station and he shared with me who his supplier was (a local car wash company for whom he clean all of their service stations), but they were not interested in working with me. And that’s fine for me for now. I work out of the back of my pick-up and like the idea of keeping my biz small - it’s just a side hustle for me right now as my full-time job is with a local municipality which is great for the benefits, paid time off, retirement, healthcare, etc. The ability to quickly unload my truck quickly and with minimal effort has more pros than cons right now. Until I joined the forum and started learning more and more here, I hadn’t been able to do more than maybe just a house or two in a weekend, and even then I would be exhausted. If I can keep learning and working on my technique, I am sure I could clean two houses in a day easy, heck, even by lunch time if they are the size of the ones I normally clean. But, for now, I am still learning and don’t want to get too much chemical so that it expires before I have a chance to use it. As I do it now, I suspect I’ll average around 3-5 gallons of SH per a house. Picking up some 5-gal containers of SH would be ideal, but for the moment I can just as easily dump a few gallons of SH into a 5-gal pail, add water and surfactant and go to town. I know that to most guys on here spending $12-20 on chems to clean each house might not work for them, but for me, for right now, I am ok with spending that.
With all of that stated, I do intend to try and bump into some other local companies around here and see if I can gain access to their SH sources. I do want to continue to better myself and there’s no reason to leave money on the table if it isn’t necessary!
@PPWofLexSC Thanks for posting all this!!! As another new guy researching the industry I can’t tell you how inspirational this is! Makes me want to get out there tomorrow and start practicing some more! Exactly what I needed to see this evening! Thanks again for taking the time.
Thanks for sharing your success story. This is awesome to see.
As far as when to find a chem supplier: you’ll get to a point where rinsing and crushing one gallon bottles to recycle each week will get very tiresome. That’s when you know to find a real supplier 
I had many weeks where there was a whole bin full of crushed bottles next to our household recycling out at the curb. I would buy 4 gallon cases of 12.5% from our local Ocean State Job Lot store. Must’ve made the Waste Management employees very curious 
I called all of the chemical suppliers around me within a 90 minute radius or so, and finally found one that serviced our area regularly and was willing to deliver 40+ gallons at a time in 5 gallon carboys. I had to make arrangements with my local hardware store to receive the shipments, since they won’t deliver to a residential address.
This year, I’m hoping to maybe have 55 gal drums delivered to a commercial shop space that’s rented by a friend of mine. It would save me another 50¢+/gallon if I could do that.
So I do have a question as I am new to this. I am aware that I have to use chemicals like SH but I too bought my Dewalt pressure washer from Home Depot and do not have a chemical set up. Can I use my pressure washer and adjustable chemical injector to pretreat or do I have to get one of those chemical back packs with the really short hose and sprayer until I’m able to get a separate chemical set up?
You can use - as I do as well as many many others do - a downstream chemical injector after your pump. Lots of us run the GP Hi-Draw from PressureTek but be sure to get the correct one for your size of machine.
But I guess it depends on what you are pre-treating? Most of us in the industry say pre-treat when we are referring to the application of SH and a surfactant to concrete surfaces such as a driveway or sidewalk before we apply pressure with surface cleaner. Depending on how bad your build up of organic is you can often use just your house wash mix as a concrete pre-treatment. If it’s really bad you will need a stronger / hotter mix and most guys can’t do that with our washers. You should then NOT use a backpack sprayer, but rather a pump up sprayer or a 12 volt system to apply the hotter mix. Hopefully that makes sense.
To make a hotter mix just use less water more SH and a some surfactant. Rarely would you need hotter than a DS inj can provide you with for concrete.
I really appreciate it Thomas.
Using a downstream chemical injector after your pump can be a game-changer for efficiency. The GP Hi-Draw from PressureTek is a popular choice among pros. It’s crucial to get the right size for your machine though.
This was a thread from years ago.
2 years ago.
This sounds so AI generated. His next post, which was deleted, had a spam link with similar verbiage. Looks like the AI bots are getting smarter.
The astro turfing will be next to impossible to differentiate from real conversations. Amazon/google/facebook will love it for their next attempt. I guarantee that the two political parties are already working on strategies’ to incorporate this nonsense.
They’re sales people just like the rest of us… 
But really, who isn’t working on strategies to incorporate it?
