Good Saturday everyone! I’m new to the industry but thankful for this forum and the knowledge you give.
Definitely a rookie question coming at you. But thank you in advance for the help!
Question regarding surfactant. A customs I have down not want any bleach on the house or stained wood deck. What is a good surfactant to use with no chems that would bleach or cause issue to the wood stain deck.
I’m looking at Elemonator. But can’t find the specific ingredients used in it. What is the ingredient used in it called Chlora-boost? Will that cause any issue to the wood stained deck and the Sherman Williams paint we all hate to hear about. The house is white.
You can use Elemonator on its own in this situation.
Though SH is what takes care of most things including algae, spiderwebs, etc.
So I’d set expectations pretty low.
Some would not mess with the hassle of a home owner telling them what products to use/not use.
But if you know what you’re doing, that deck should be fine with a normal house wash.
If he’s insistent, and he understands you won’t be removing any algae, and you’re good with that, then wash away. You’re basically giving the house a good rinse down.
This goes down to educating the customer…we get our fair share of them, and we educate them on the safety of properly using SH in a proper housewash mix. When you get down to it, it’s actually the primary ingredient in the products recommended by nearly every manufacturer of the roofing/siding products that we clean. When you better understand what you’re doing, it’s relatively easy to put these folks at ease with a few key phrases and knowledge. You may even get them better motivated to properly water their landscaping in the days before/after the wash.
If they don’t come around, we send them on their way. Not putting our name on something half-washed. I’d rather we be known for not providing service to people when their expectations are incompatible with our processes. We may even point them towards someone they might prefer…
We already established surfactant is in fact a soap and does clean. Go back in the archives, our resident chemist had a discussion about this and replied to your statement back then.
I guess both are kind of true…it cleans in the dirt/dishes sort of sense, it doesn’t do squat to mold/mildew/algae, which is mostly what we “clean”. My understanding is it will help loosen up some of the dirt on pourous surfaces (and maybe with some light oil), but it’s real use for our pruposes is to break surface tension and improve dwell time on surfaces. In that sense, it doesn’t clean in softwash parlance. It is basically a soap, but it alone isn’t much use for our purposes…and customers need to understand that, or it’s just suds and high pressure.
I’ve used surfactant only on Hardie board houses many times, definitely helps remove dirt and dust. We have a high end housing community on the east end and that’s pretty much all I can do.
I guess makes sense if there’s no organics to kill, just don’t see that, like ever. Maybe if there’s some concern of SW paint…but then we just wouldn’t wash the place at all. lol
You can use Simple Green. What SW recommends for their organic paints. Does ok for general washing, not a lot for anything other than extremely light mildew stains. Kind of expensive, about $10/gal if I remember, and you need to mix it about 50-50 at least if downstreaming.
Do you all have customers that want yearly washes? Usually those customers for me have no growth on their house. They just want the dirt gone and a sort of “refresh” of the outside.
I have a hard time searching stuff here, I love Mary, but a soaps basically makes water wetter on my opinion. I use a product called bleach add. It ain’t a soap. It makes bubbles so you can see where you are spraying. Not much cling. More cling equals more rinsing.
We’ve got quite a few, we’ve considered making it a subscription thing of some sort. We just make a point to send them an annual reminder postcard and follw that up with a phone call 12 months out from their service. Usually several book another appointment. Mostly folks go about 2 years though.
I ask them now if theyd like me to come back once a year to maintain it so it never gets to how it was and 1 less thing they have to worry about and most are like sure good idea !
