Under Pressure

Last weekend, Trev bought up the big petrol-powered pressure cleaner, and the big walk-behind cleaner. It's a beast of a machine, and makes mince-meat of cleaning concrete and pavers. It had been two years since we had last pressure-cleaned our patio and garage, so was well overdue.

With the wet season up here, any exposed concrete in the sun quickly has a layer of black slimy moss/mould grow on it, and it can get quite slippery. Plus, it just looks bad. So the driveway and the pavers at the back really needed a clean. The carport and patio area don't get the mould on them (due to the "pavecrete" coating, as well as lack of sun), but they do get a lot of dirt and mud tracked in on them during summer, and over time they look dirtier and dirtier. You can clean them off with a hose and a scrubbing brush, but it's a lot of effort, and it doesn't get as good a finish as the pressure cleaner. Not to mention that the pressure cleaner is a lot more environmentally friendly compared to using soap or chlorine to clean the concrete and mould, which runs straight into the stormwater drain, and into the creek across the road.

So, once we'd moved all of the outdoor furniture off the patio...


... it was time to get stuck in. The big walk behind disc cleaner makes the job so much easier and quicker. We still need the high pressure lance to do the edges, as well as any fiddly bits (the big rocks around the garden edges, the paved steps, etc) - you've just got to be very careful when using it, as it would pull skin off any errant feet quicker than you could say "ow - my feet!". It's so powerful that you have to even be very careful with it on the pavecrete coating on the concrete - too close, and the pressure will blast it clean off the concrete.


Badger thought the whole process was wonderful, especially being able to bark at the petrol engine on the pressure cleaner whenever it was started. Of course, he was just thinking of when we had finished, how he was going to find the biggest pool of mud he could, then track it straight back onto the concrete...

The process is not helped by whoever did the concreting at our place. The back patio (as shown above) doesn't drain to the far corners, as you'd expect. It drains towards the back sliding door of the house. Then, from there, down to the BBQ area. However, once down into the BBQ area, it doesn't drain towards the drain - no - it drains back against the drop off, and pools there. Same in the carport. Instead of sloping down from the back of the carport and out the driveway, it actually drains from the front back towards the inside back corner, where it pools against the house. There's even a handy little lip at the front of the carport to prevent it from being able to run forward and out, and frustrates you when you're trying to broom/squeegy it that way.

Whoever set up the concrete and screed it deserves to be shot. If they had taken an extra 2 minutes to set the slope of the slabs in such a way as to drain water in the appropriate directions (and lets face it - we do get a fair bit of water up here every now and then), then cleaning these areas would be a joy and a breeze. But because they didn't, this job is always a royal pain. Not to mention the potential damage to the house from draining water towards it and holding it there. To fix it however, we would need to jackhammer up the existing concrete slabs and have them re-laid with the slope in the right directions - a job that would be so prohibitively expensive as to render it not economically practical. The carport I'm not too worried about - that's where my ensuite and an extra bedroom are going in my Future Plans(tm). But that back patio makes me cringe whenever I think about it.

The joys of buying a second hand house, and needing to live with other people's shortcuts! At least we now have beautifully clean and sparkly concrete and paving. It really does look a lot better. And with the trees down the side gone, it will be much easier to keep this way now.