A guy posted that he did a driveway and got a call back from the customer SEVEN months later. The customer said the driveway was all striped up. The PW guy went out and took a picture of it and sure enough it was totally striped up. Come to find out PW guy never did pre or post. Just goes to show that you can use pressure and get it clean, but if you dont kill that stuff just below the surface, it will come back to haunt you. As much as I DESPISE the Florida heat, im kind of looking forward to how much it helps the SH eat that stuff up with the pre and post. Maybe I can cut back to 2% in the summer months.
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Ive been downstreaming alot of my driveways using a 20" 4gpm but had to hit few spots with pump sprayer on a few bad spots but most of time its been fine.
Same here. I did my own little driveway last spring and a few months later you could see stripes. Just got lazy and didn’t bother with the post treat.
Thats a fact bro. Gotta post. On driveways that aint bad i can get away with no pre, or maybe a soap or water pre, but after the SC hits it, gotta post. I think pre only makes the cleanup session go faster, but its the post that is the critical long lasting magic.
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Am I missing something? No matter how hot you might post treat, it’s inert in 24 hours or so once you mix it… A good pre-treat would accomplish accomplish killing the organics. It’s not like SH is a “delayed release” cure-all
I guess it is inert and turns to salt in that time period but I would guess it does its job before as the final touch before it turns inert. Not trying to be funny, if im missing something here please let me know as you are way more the pro than I am or ever will be.
I definitely am not…most of this is new to me, these guys are the pros. But I don’t see how different it is than porous wood cleaning… Concrete can stand up to leaving the SH on it, but I don’t think it’s in any way necessary. You treat, dwell, and rinse…organics dead and gone. I mean, that’s the process we always use on everything else, and guarantee the organics don’t come back for 12 months…I’d expect thesame to be true of flatwork, barring a low area with standing puddling and such.
I washed a large driveway over 5000sft andwas late in the day and never apply the post treat. Some months later I washed a house cross the street and stop by the big driveway and had stripping appearing. From that day I always post treat and since I always wash in the same zip codes I never saw a driveway that I wash with stripping again.
But again, the pre starts to kill it and loosen it up for a faster cleaning. But everything I know says after you do that there is unseen organic that is deep and alive, and the post helps to kill that off. And yes you are. You run multiple trucks and are a totally pro operation. Dont sell yourself short. We can disagree but I have nothing but respect for you.
Surface cleaners aren’t perfect by design, they overlap more on the outer edge than the center, and that’s why stripes happen. I’d love to see a cylindrical cleaner with multiple nozzles like one of those old manual reel lawn mowers. No chance of striping with that design.
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A beater brush style surface cleaner, like an upright vacuum…? Something to ponder 
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Appreciate it, but I didn’t start it, and I’m at about a solid year in the washing business. That’s why most of my posts are posed as questioning more than stating. I’m usually a good learner, but I’m always learning 
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All post treating does is bleach out the inefficiency’s of a surface cleaner. As @dcbrock said surface cleaners aren’t perfect by design, the nozzles need to be in a certain spot for the bar to spin, outer edge does the bulk of the cleaning due to overlap. The dirtier your concrete the more obvious these lines are. You can’t always see these lines when concrete is wet, post treating eliminates that guess work. Takes 5 minutes and you don’t have to think about it.
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Makes plenty of sense…just not something we ever do, and I’ve not seen a single complaint on concrete cleanings (well, 1 lady last year who thought the spalling and aging lines would look new again 
). I know we have pretty defined systems, just knowing how sensitive some guys are to chem usage amounts due to budgets, I’d think more would question the need for post-treating given that experience… 
