The latest and hottest appliance that people are snapping up for the home and garden this year is the pressure washer. It’s turned out to be a very smart buy depending on what you will be using it for once you get it home.
Most people use pressure washers to clean off large surfaces. This isn’t to say that the most powerful should be used at home, as they should be left to the professionals to tackle. No, the ones for use at home are a tad more sedate and not as powerful as say a fire hose, and they are specifically designed for ordinary household use.
The first handy tip that you will need to know is to keep your distance from the surface you want to wash down. Oh, this isn’t to avoid you getting hosed, it’s to prevent water damage to the surface you’re intending to clean. So, basically only get closer if you need to.
The pressure washers that have a higher output are powered by gas. You would want to likely use them outside exclusively. Electric models make good chore boys for smaller tasks, like cleaning out the dog pen, but you need to figure out what you are going to do with a pressure washer before investing any moola.
Here’s another thing you need to know about buying a pressure washer. There isn’t a whole lot of variety available on the market. It is either a gas powered model or an electric model. This is the major reason you need to know what you want to use your pressure washer to accomplish. The gas ones give you more power and the electric ones are better suited to other jobs.
Many people confuse a pressure washer and an ordinary hose, figuring that if your stick your thumb over the end of the hose as its running, then you have a pressure washer of sorts. While this is a simplified version of the idea of a pressure washer, it doesn’t quite capture what they are really about.
The major reason for pressure washers is to clean a lot more quickly with a faster spray of water. In fact, pressure washers are painstakingly designed to raise the water in the hose to a much higher pressure. It beats the “thumb over the end of the hose” kind of pressure any day and makes cleaning a lot easier.
Either gas or electric powered pressure washers have different pounds per square inch (psi) measurements and are generally rated between 1,000 to 5,000 psi. As we mentioned earlier in this article, gas powered pressure washers give the most kick. The garden hose gives you about 40 psi with a flow of roughly 8 gallons a minute, while a pressure washer has a much higher psi and uses about 2 gallons a minute. Quite the difference isn’t it? This is why you need to figure out what you will be using a pressure washer for before purchasing one.
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