Lichen on Plastic Coated Chain Link Fence on Tennis Court


Got a call from a HOA president about removing this Lichen that is covering about 500 LF of rubber coated chain link fence around the community tennis courts.

I’ve read. Read a bunch of the topics here about lichen removal and a lot of the suggestions were hit it with a hot mix and give it time to die. But that’s not really an option here. I need to try to get it removed on the spot. One side of the fence is a tennis court and the other side is just grass and shrubs.

I was wondering if a house wash mix and turbo nozzle at low pressure would do the trick. See a lot of suggestions about brushing lichen off of roofs and other tough areas. Do you guys think a 1% to 3% SH mix then hitting it with a brush followed by a rinse would do the trick?

I’ve just never been asked or seen any topics about removing lichen from such a a substrate before.

Any advice would be appreciated.

I wouldn’t turbo that, too many spots to miss… lichen takes closer to 5-6% in my experience… apply, dwell, light-medium pressure (1,000-1,500psi)… stand on the grass and spray towards the courts. I would assume it will fall off just like it’s on vinyl… but I have no experience with cleaning that coating so maybe I’m missing something?

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Ya, me neither. I’ve never seen it maybe just never noticed lichen growing like that on a plastic/rubber coated fence! I’m in Georgia though so nothing surprises me.

Do a test spot and that’ll tell ya everything you need to know

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I’d bet a 2% mix hit from two angles, a 10 minute dwell, then walk along with a brush will knock that off, then low pressure rinse is all it will take. That lichen won’t be too embedded onto rubber coated steel

It came off somewhat easily with my fingers so that’s what I’m hoping for.

Just wasn’t sure if anyone here had come across this situation. Couldn’t find any info online about lichen on a fence like this :laughing:

I plan on going back later this week to do just that before giving a price. The facility manager tried using their little box store pressure washer to remove it and gave up.

I have a hot water machine so maybe that will help pursuade it as well.

Just be sure to set expectations about the cleaner on the court itself… if the fence looks like that I’m sure the court has some sort of organic build up on it that will likely be affected by a 2% mix. And, although it didn’t look like it in the posted photo, you stated there’s grass on the one side of the fence and 2% can certainly cause that to burn.

As far as cleaning the fence, I’d say a strong HW mix, 10 dwell for it to be absorbed by the lichens, then a good ole white tip on a wand, similar pressure to what you’d use on wood, but likely not having to be as close.

Shockingly the court is in pretty good condition. They’ve managed to keep it pretty clean. I am going to add in a complete court rinse which is going to be needed after all this lichen is knocked off.

I’ll report back to this thread after doing some testing in case anyone else runs into this.

UPDATE AFTER TEST TRIP:

I wanted to give an update in case anyone else comes across something similar in the future.

I went back today to do some testing before providing the quote. Here’s what I tried and what I found out: (Sorry I was adjusting my mix on the fly with my 12v bucket sprayer so I don’t have exact ratios.)

Straight Water: - Used varying nozzles and pressures to get a baseline and using straight water would have taken a week to complete this job.

1% - 2% SH mix, surfactant, 15 min dwell: - Didn’t seem to have much more effect than straight water.

3.5% - 5% SH mix, surfactant, 15 min dwell - This seemed to be the sweet spot. I didn’t want to go this high because of grass and other shrubs around the fenceline, but I also didn’t want to be out there for a week and they don’t want to pay me to be out there for a week. I soaked everything around the test area before and after. This ratio seemed to loosen it up enough so that I could quickly spray it loose from the fence. I used 25* and 40* nozzles to test efficiency, but to my surprise, the most effective nozzle by far was my XJet nozzle. The lichen didn’t seem to care about how much pressure you hit it with but the amount of focused water that I could put out with the XJet just blasts it right off. It was also clutch for changing pattern on the fly to hit the high up spots (12’ tall fence) and then wider pattern again on lower areas. Something about the amount of water flow from the XJet made it go so much quicker.

Hot Water - Hitting it with 180* water didn’t seem to make any difference at all, except melting the coating on the fence. I didn’t figure it would help but I wanted to test everything.

Brush - Way to difficult, even after a SH soak and incredibly exhausting. Not effective in the least.

Some areas of the fence that have an extreme amount of lichen needed to be sprayed from both sides of the fence because it’s wrapped around the fencing like coating on a wire.

There are a total of (48) 10’ x 12’ sections and the really bad ones took about 30 minutes each with dwell and rinse. Luckily only about 18 sections are really really bad. That time should come down a bit with a system in place but it’s going to suck regardless.

My setup: 8gpm 3000psi Karcher Hot Water setup. I also have a 4gpm Predator for difficult to access areas but I didn’t even bother bringing it to test on this.

Picture of test area. (Yes I also rinsed a section of the tennis court in the area I worked so they could see how bad that area looked. One side of the court is under a tree line and it’s completely black in areas. Now they want to add a court cleaning after the fence is done :grin:)


More pics of what it looked like before:


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Excellent summary and update. Much appreciated.

Appreciate the update, that’s kind of what I was thinking, so good to know for future reference.

did you try any quats? Lichen isn’t just algae, it is algae and a fungus.

I did not, only SH.

What product would you recommend trying?

how did you do the court?

I don’t know about a product, maybe a chemical - Benzalkonium chloride, or any quat, maybe add some surfactant for cling. My main reason for suggesting an alternative to bleach is that SH is corrosive, and diluting it down with water doesn’t neutralize that corrosiveness. Your spraying metal with SH, although I think you said yours is plastic coated.

Sure bleach will work on the algea and pressure will knock down the fungus. Not saying you did anything wrong, just a suggestion on using an alternative chemical. Any quaternary ammonia (ammonium?, not sure just say quats) would work I would think, but I’m no scientist. Maybe someone can find cocogirls info and tag her. I just know her name isn’t mary. :grimacing:

Lol - this site has a lichen removal for sale, kinda pricey, didn’t read SDS.
lichen junk for sale

edit: That stuff is all alcohol. Wet and forget is the only commercially available product that has quats in it (that I found within 3 minutes of googling).

Interesting. Thanks for the info. Still waiting on their approval of the quote so in the meantime I’m going to go down the quats rabbit hole and see what I can find.

I am interested to hear what your research finds. I’ve done my own, but I like to get other people’s take on things. Sometimes I arrive at an erroneous conclusion and have found that bouncing ideas off others benefits me. A separate conclusion would be the pricing aspect of it, is it worth it to use quats? Just the whole cost/benefit analysis of the product.

I would apply the quats to the fence with a 12v or ryobi and walk away. I would come back another day to then hit that with HW mix and rinse, then clean the court. Not sure it would work out, just off the cuff thinking.

I’m really hoping you get the job and I’m interested to hear and see your outcomes. Just to be clear, what works most cost efficiently for you (time included) is what I will steal from you :smile:

Wow! Nice work especially on the trials to figure out what works. Way to go showing the customer the “before & after” for the upsell.
I use this method all the time for better revenue.

@OhioFloMo @qons @Dirtyboy @WashTheLZ @Nickski @PPWofLexSC @LetterGuy

I’ve been meaning to report back to this post to update everyone, but as we all know it’s busy season and I just haven’t had the chance to sit down and do it.

WARNING Long Winded Story Ahead

First off, I have to share a story of how this all played out that I’m sure some of you can all relate to. When I originally spoke to the HOA President about this job (and others around the property) she mentioned that they had “a guy” come out and give them a quote for $400 to do this entire fence line. Keep in mind that there were (48) 10’ x 12’ sections of fence around these courts. I knew that it would take cleaning these from both sides, so really, it’s double that. The “$400 Guy” came out and did a “test” and never came back. This had been like 3 weeks prior to me speaking with her. I felt bad afterwards but I literally laughed in front of her and another Board Member when she told me this story. I told her that there’s no way anyone that priced that at $400 had any clue what they were doing and of course he gave up after coming out for 30 minutes to do a test. It really was a ■■■■■ of a job. They also tried to get the “resident handyman” to do it with a little box store machine and he gave up after 3 hours and wasn’t able to get a single piece off. I saw some of his other pressure washing “handywork” around the complex so that wasn’t shocking.

I told her that my cost was going to be nowhere near that but if they bundled some additional work around the property that I would give them a discount on the total invoice. My price for cleaning just the fence was $1400. I sent the quote for this and a few other items over for approval and a week or so went by with some texting back and forth about updates on Board approval all the hemming and hawing back and forth about spending the money, yada yada yada.

After about 2 weeks I finally get a call from the HOA President and she apologized for the delay in getting back to me, and the reason for the delay was that the “$400 Guy” showed up again out of nowhere (It’s been over a month since he came out the first time and disappeared) and said that he would have the entire fence done in by the end of the weekend. She called me about this on a Friday.

Monday rolls around and I was dying for an update, not because I was worried about losing the job, but because I knew that there’s no way the “$400 Guy” could actually do this. She calls me Monday afternoon and I asked her right away, “So, how’s it look”. She laughed and said “he showed up Saturday for an hour and couldn’t get a single panel clean and left”. My quote was approved that night and my 50% deposit was paid immediately. lol

The entire job, including a mail center gazebo, and softwashing of half of the tennis court (the pickle ball side) that was covered in black organic growth from overhanging tree canopy, was a total ■■■■■ and I wish I had charged more. Another lesson learned.

First off, I was pulling water into my buffer tank from the community clubhouse and the water pressure was so poor (I didn’t flow test it beforehand) that I actually had to run a 2nd hose from the pool area running directly into my buffer tank. With both hose valves at full open, it still couldn’t keep up with my 8GPM. I was running wide open non-stop for this because of the nature of the work, so I still had to take breaks and let the buffer tank top up every hour or so.

In regards to the method I used to clean off the Lichen, I stuck to my original idea from testing and used the old XJet nozzle so that I could adjust stream as needed for the top portion of the fences, but I quickly abandoned the usage of any chemicals. Chems were a complete waste of time of time and money in this situation. I realized that the SH wasn’t actually helping. I didn’t want to waste the time to give it enough time to dwell and attempt to kill any of the growth, and since the fence is chain link, only about 5% of what I was spraying was actually sticking to the intended target. So, I just ran full bore about 6 hours the first day and about 2 hours the second day and got it all knocked off. The lichen was wrapped around all sides of the “chain” so I had to spray from both sides and both directions (at an angle) to fully get it off. Like I said, it was a ■■■■■ and took a while to perfect the technique. The amount of lichen chunks that were blown onto the courts was UNREAL. I attached a pic for reference.

The Board and the residents were super stoked on the outcome. The fence had been like this for years and they couldn’t find anyone to come out and clean it. I suspect the previous Board President was too cheap to hire a legit person to do it. The lady I dealt with was the new President and she was motivated to get ■■■■ done, thankfully.

I’ve already been called back out to quote several other projects around the property with some big projects being discussed for later this year. So, all in all, this ■■■■■■ little ■■■■■ of a job is looking to be a good long term relationship.

Here are a couple of pics of the finished product. I took a ton of drone videos and pictures but again I haven’t had time to put together the before / after video yet.









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