With the high humidity and copious winter rain we experience here, dealing with the various non-animal life that grows on man-made structures is a way of life. The things we’ve noticed growing are:
- Algae, usually as thin green layer over the substrate, which is impartially wood, synthetic decking (think Trex), or metal (such as our roofing). Algae is neither a plant nor an algae – it is a protist and has over 27,000 identified species.
- Moss, usually growing in cracks where their roots can penetrate. Moss is a non-vascular spore-bearing plant with at 12,000 identified species. They attach themselves to a substrate with small root hairs.
- Lichens, which grow on our synthetic decking and metal roofing, but I’ve not seen them on our wood surfaces (which is strange because the bark on our tree trunks are covered with them). They are a symbiosis of fungi, algae or cyanobacteria, and yeast.
- Fungi. Though rare, I’ve seen small mushrooms growing in the cracks between our decking and other unlikely spots.
- Small weeds, which also grow in the cracks between our decking where enough detritus has accumulated for the weeds roots to get a purchase.
When we moved in, we saw that it had been quite some time since any serious measures to battle the encroaching temperate jungle had been taken. I suspect the decks had been treated with a commercial moss killer since I’ve found it in the shed. In general these products are not good for the environment and we didn’t want to do that on our property. So we started looking into alternative methods of controlling the growth of this life where we didn’t want it to grow. Any such strategy really involves two steps: 1) physical removal of the existing growth, and 2) application of a substance regularly to keep it from growing back.
For starters, we needed a method of physical removal. It’s hard to beat a pressure washer for such work. A high pressure spray literally blows everything out of every crevice the spray hits. The downside is that such detail work takes a long time if you’re covering a large area, but to this date I’ve not found a reasonable means of speeding this up (more on this later), unless you have the money to invest in commercial equipment (or pay someone else to do the pressure washing). We happened to have a gas-powered pressure washer that came with the home, a Crafstman 2800 PSI 2.3 gallon per minute unit. I’m not sure how old it is, but when we moved in and tried it, it did start right up. I’m not a fan of gas-powered anything out here, since we have to transport all of the fuel for such things by boat, not to mention such devices are noisy and smelly. Also electric devices in general are much simpler in design, so there’s less to break.
We used the Craftsman pressure washer infrequently for the next two years. However, it died recently, and no matter what I tried, I could not restart it. Rather than try to figure out how to fix it (if that was even possible) or cart it into town to pay for a repair that would probably be more than the unit was worth, we started looking into electric pressure washers. After much research, I settled on this Westinghouse WPX3200e Electric Pressure Washer. It had some of the best reviews, both on Amazon and other sites as well.
The WPX3200e we bought has a working (rated) pressure of 2800 PSI, which is quite high compared to the maximum. A pressure washer pump delivers a constant flow of water, and when the flow is constricted, you get increased pressure. Gas units in most cases outshine electric units in terms of delivering a higher flow of water at the same pressure because they’re not limited by how much power a standard 15 amp household circuit can deliver. The WPX3200e also has a rated flow of 1.2 gallons per minute (gpm), which is quite a bit less than the maximum of 1.76 gpm. The flow rate influences how easy it is to wash away what you’ve just blasted off.
Don’t fall for electric pressure washer disinformation! Pressure washers are almost always advertised with maximum pressure and flow statistics, not working pressure and flow. They might achieve that for a split second on startup or shutdown, but as far as what they deliver on a consistent basis as you are working, it’s usually far less. An electric pressure washer plugged into a standard outlet is limited by the laws of physics in what it can do. If a pressure washer does not advertise its working (or ‘rated’) pressure and flow, there’s probably a reason for that – it’s often far less than the maximums.
Is it effective? Unequivocally, yes! Here’s a few photos from our cottage (there’s a bonus pic of our Frenchie Maya in the last one):
The pressure washing breathes new life into our cedar shingles, our Trex railings, and removes that black layer from our decking that gets slick as ice when it’s wet. I have plans to use it on our boat to eliminate the white streaks on the sides from rubbing against dock bumpers…and clean our roof, blast spider webs off things from a distance, etc, etc. So far we’ve put maybe 35 hours of constant operation on the WPX3200e so far, and all has been well.