I was asked by a coworker to come out and quote cleaning up around a recently added inground pool in their back yard. New concrete, less than 6 months old. I know I don’t want to hit this hard at all, but should I expect to be able to SH / surfactant this and use light pressure from the wand to get this looking right? I’ve already warned the homeowner that this will be my first cleaning of new concrete and that I’d be starting with real light pressure. They’ve seen me use my surface cleaner before and thought I’d just zip through this cleaning real easy like, but I stated that I suspect it’ll likely not be the case here as all the other flat work I’ve done was older concrete.
If you can adjust your surface cleaners PSI down to about 1000 with different nozzles then you could still use the surface cleaner. Just might be a pain to drag around. This seems to me like a pretreat and broom and rinse job just to be on the safe side
I’d just soft wash it just to be safe. Don’t use any surfactant though because you don’t want that in the pool. Let them know they’ll have to adjust pool chemicals after you’re done because some SH will get in the pool.
Thanks Dustin and Brian! I also made sure to prep the customer in in the event that I “accidentally” fall into the pool on Friday while cleaning around it. The temps should be in the 90’s by the time I make it to this particular job.
The more chems that get in the pool the more it’s going to throw off the pool water quality. Using surfactant on concrete isn’t really a necessity anyways so might as well prevent it from going in the pool all together. Not sure if they’d like their pool smelling like lemons.
This obviously isn’t around a pool deck but this was new concrete <1 year old and I ended up pretreating with HW mix, brooming it in, then dropping my surface cleaner to 800-1000 psi and surface cleaning it. Came out good. The surface cleaner dragged like crazy but I feel it’s still faster than using the wand for the whole thing
