Pressure Washer Maintenance – Making the Best of Frozen Days

Image via Wikipedia – pressure washing military vehicles

We’ve posted some articles on how winter temperatures sometimes keep us from doing our normal pressure washing work.  Sometimes this actually works to our advantage because we can take a full day that isn’t going to get above freezing and use it to catch up on all the maintenance of 6 trucks and 12 pressure washers.

Although it’s not a day to make money, we still bring in our drivers to work on their own trucks with some help from our service manager.  That way they get a few hours in, they learn more about maintaining their equipment and they become a little more invested in taking care of their own equipment.

We do this at least a couple times a year – usually once early winter and once early spring.  If we get a some rainy days in the summer, we’ll do the same then.  It’s usually a pretty laid back day, but we get a lot done so our crews have an easier time when they get back to pressure washing.

Pressure washers are not the kind of machines that run forever without maintenance.

The may seem simple but there are a lot of parts to make them work right. They have valves in the pumps that have to be replaced. They have hoses and fittings that break. They have engines and switches and thermostats and pressure relief valves, all of which wear out with use. And if you have to pay someone else to fix your pressure washing equipment, it can get expensive.

Many clients have called us back after they bought their own pressure washer to save money – then found out the expense of keeping them working properly and paying someone to run it were more than hiring us to do the job. If you’ve never used a pressure washer, you won’t be efficient working with it. It takes training and practice to be efficient, just like any other skill.