When did I say don’t check for oxidation?
Always check for oxidization
That’s who I meant to reply to,sorry
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Patriot is a veteran with tons of hours under his belt. If he has a system that works for him I respect that. I would say the rest of us need to be more cautious.
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99% of every vinyl house I do has oxidation. Once you’ve wash 5 houses you can tell whether it is just by looking at. Just assume they all do and you’ll be fine.
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Same. Had one problem early on in the business, did some research and pretty much train our guys to do exactly what you mentioned. Haven’t had a problem since to my knowledge.
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That results in no oxidation showing? Could you explain further? I just did my first practice run on my dads garage today. It’s old light blue siding and the same thing happened as the guy who posted this.
Same, if I went out in person and checked for oxidation…
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I’d spend about 100 hours a season driving around
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I would find oxidation on every single house
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Explain the process you used to wash and maybe we can help.
Anything you can do to keep from disturbing the oxidation is must. If the siding is really hot from the sun beaming on it and, you don’t wet it or cool it down, the house wash mix running down can sometimes disturb it from it drying the second it hits it. You also want to make sure you stay back far enough so you don’t have any heavy streams of water hitting the siding and never touch or rub it.
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An oxidised house will still be oxidised after it’s washed. What your trying to do is not disturb the current state of oxidation, just clean the crap off. Oxidation removal is something else.
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I used the power washer I already own (2600 psi 2.3 gpm) with a downstream injector I bought off amazon. I placed it directly into a gallon of 10% SH and played with the adjustment on the downstream injector. It fully open most of the time. I did not pre wet the area I just started spraying the SH mix. Let it dwell 5-10 minutes. Then sprayed it off with a larger orifice soap tip. I then switched to smaller tip which probably put me at 400-500 psi. I tried to keep it further away but probably got close a few times. Being naïve and in a hurry I expected things to just melt off like nothing but clearly this is not just spray on and off. He’s happy with the results compared to what it looked like before but something just didn’t seem right.
Thank you for clarifying.
Did you use any surfactant?
No… But I have some on the way from Pressure Tek, To be honest we were both so excited to do it we just went ahead and started. I’ve been looking forward to this for days.
If you’re doing it right, it’ll generally “melt off”. Sometimes you have to hit it twice. Even thrice.
My guess is you were drawing anywhere from 7:1 to 12:1.
With true 10% SH that should be enough. But with no surfactant, you didn’t get any real dwell time.
And thus without anything melting off, you used pressure. If you’re doing it right, you don’t need to use pressure. Let the chems do their job.
You did right by practicing on a relative’s home.
When you get your surfactant, don’t over do it. A little goes a loooooong ways.
Btw, welcome to the forum! There’s gold in these mountains. And a few 49ers so watch out! 
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It certainly SMELLED like enough SH 
That’s good to know. I have a gallon of Elemonator on the way plus 2-3 gpm j-rod tips. Also more practice siding to experiment on. Could a lack of surfactant be why there was still some black staining left behind? (He had problems with his drip edge which caused water to collect behind the gutter and cause A LOT of mold - some on the vinyl and some on aluminum soffit).
Thanks. I quickly realized I just need to do some reading before asking questions. Softwashing seems intimidating compared to the window cleaning I’m used to. I had my hand held by someone with 27 years of experience and now I’m totally clueless trying to learn this 
Just realized I contradicted myself by asking another question then saying I just need to read more! The SH has gotten to me. Maybe I should just stick to sniffing ammonia in my window cleaning bucket…
It’s always you window cleaners that find this SH stuff complicated. Why is that a common occurrence? 
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Have you met most window cleaners? I tell myself that I’m not like the rest of them but clearly that’s not the case…
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