So I have a question for you guys about my surface cleaner. I’ve never had an issue to date, but today it started giving me fits. Honestly, I don’t think it is the surface cleaner. So I was cleaning some concrete around a swimming pool area and everything seemed perfectly normal. I was almost done when it just started to seem extremely weak. It acted like it was struggling just to turn the nozzles. I turned it on it’s side and it seemed to push water and rotate, but the minute I laid it down and tried to clean, it just hesitated. I instantly could notice a difference in performance.
The nozzles did not appear clogged when I laid it over and checked. They sprayed fine. My next logical guess is the unloader on my machine. Could the unloader be going bad and releasing too early? After I finished to the pool area, I washed the client’s house with no issues. I would expect the load from a surface cleaner to be much greater than just a wash nozzle. Distance and pressure all seemed the same during the house wash.
Do you have an in line filter going into your washer or one that is just like a screen where the inlet is?
Before I switched to an in line, I had some debris get in the screen inlet. This starved my pump and it wasn’t really noticeable until I went to do concrete, and my bar seemed like it was stuck. It also didn’t clean very well once or did start rotating.
Lesson learned. Check the screen and replace it with a proper filter.
I am stopping to buy a gauge and fittings to test unloader on my way home. Gonna pull nozzles out of the surface cleaner and check to make sure nothing got plugged up. If there’s nothing, I will test the unloader. As far as the filters are concerned, I only have the banjo filter on the output side of buffer tank and then an inlet filter from water source.
I have no complaints in regard to the surface cleaner performance. It has performed great up to this point, and I can’t be quick to blame the issue on that.
As Innocentbystander said - change the swivel - I literally just had the exact same issue happen to me. It was not very obvious that the swivel wasn’t spinning as well as it was when new, but looks as though grit got up inside and slowed it down. At least that was the case with mine.
My second season I went to the first house of the year and immediately noticed the pump was cavitating bad. Ten minutes of fooling around led me to disconnect supply garden hose from pump inlet and there was a lizard who had been stopped by that cheap little screened o-ring. The lizard didn’t make it, but the washer lives on making money to this day.