Pressure Washer!

TwinRudders

TwinRudders

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Promised myself this year I would get a Pressure Washer to help clean boat etc. There're just too many makes and models to decide...
Anyone bought one and like to offer some advice. I don't want to spend a fortune but I don't want to be thinking I could do better squeezing the end of the hosepipe...

J
 
I bought one of these before xmas. Not the cheapest or the most powerful, but it doesn't need electricity and will work from a bucket. (5 gallons lasts about 10 minutes), so all in all is ideal for the boatyard.
 
I got one from Wickes a couple of years back it is fine for the boat. They oftern have them half price £29.99 and they have a 2 year warrenty as standard
 
I bought the petrol one, exactly the same as Dave_White. Purchased from Makro. Absolutely superb. No messing about with cables any more and no more tripping the trip switches at the marina. Enough pressure to do anything I want.
 
Bought the cheapest I could find at that time was the simple Karcher .... about 50 notes.
It does the job ... ok doesn't have the high volume wide spray as the more expensive jobs - but pressure is same at 100+
There are now italian jobs coming on market at less than 40 quid - same machine basically .... different colour case and label.

For the one a year underhull clean and patio stuff - they are fine.
 
I had the cheapest karcher as a starter, but blew the motor caused I used it too much. Went upscale so that I could have continuous use and much more pressure as I occasionally do the slipway. Great piece of kit, but was expensive (abt 160 bar with the pressure lance!)
 
On another note, several years ago I was contracted with similar machines as listed above to blast marina pavements prior to the marina opening so the boat owners would have a nice platform to walk down on opening day.

The machine was running too slow so I had to hire a commercial machine. The commercial machine was running at 10% of the speed required to wash the pontoons in the requested time so, 10 commercial machines later and 10 persons too, we were on target.

However the demand of water from the new marina water facilities into 10 commercial blasters destroyed the marinas pier water pumping equipment as it could not keep up with the demand. As well as being a small oversite.

However as we could not get water we hired a pump from the company that supplied the blasters. We pumped sea water into the hoses and presto we were on target again.

However the knot on the rope holding the pump slipped adn the pump fell into the sludge at the bottom of the marina sea bed. The first sign was when mud started coming through the waterblasters.

However by this time all 10 blasters were destroyed as the mud had destroyed the internal workings. So I took all the machines back to the hire shop and requested replacements.

The replacement machines worked fine, but by this time the hire shop management was alerted to the fact that we had just destroyed 10 blasting machines. They sent out a rep who told us that the salt would destroy the machines. I agreed and thought to myself if only he had seen the mud oozing through them a few hours prior that would probably not be to good either.

At that minute the plumbing company came down to inform us that the fresh water pump had been upgraded adn we should be able to get enough water for all the machines and carried on for teh next 36 hours blasting bird crud off the concrete.
 
Does anyone know of a pressure washer that would be happy with seawater?

I don't have electricity or fresh water where I want to use one.


Alan
 
Harben pumps can run on sea water or pump slurry or grit as the pumping chambers are all rubber, so no problems with contamination. I ran Harben pumps for a few years and only ever replaced one diaphragm.

With pressure blasting flow is every bit as important as pressure. You can create high pressure by restricting the flow with a small nozzle lance, but it's like cleaning with a pencil. You need to able to work at about 2-3000psi at about 6 gallons a minute (work it out in metric yourself) to do serious cleaning work.
Wait till you get a 10,000psi machine working at 30 gallons a minute. Stand back! /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
Sea water ...

On Chemical ships we used the larger Karchers with seawater to blast out tanks etc. - then barrels of fresh-water laced with detergent. The SW was more abrasive and cleaned much better than FW ... but we had to be careful to make sure a good amount of FW went through after.

I have used SW through my previous cheap Karcher ... but I think the 3 yrs failure of it may have been due to not so careful rinse out with FW after last time ...

Many people wonder if they can run pressure washer without mains water pressure - yes you can ... best way is to fill a drum or butt so that it has a head of water above the level of the pump. The pump will generally empty the butt right out once it has "draw" even to the water below the pump ...
If you have a pump that wont draw ... a small submerged pump - a whale / LVm or similar is often enough to do the trick ... as the smaller washers use small volume at high pressure - unlike larger pro machines that have high pressure and higher volume rates.
 
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