Pressure Washing Edge Hill

Shade is the price of the trees

The canopy is what makes Edge Hill worth living in. Big established street trees, the Botanic Gardens through the middle of it, Whitfield Range climbing up behind, and gardens that have had eighty years to fill in. It is also the reason your house needs washing more often than a house on an open block three kilometres away.

Two things follow from a canopy. Sunlight never reaches the south and west walls, so anything that gets wet stays wet. And leaf, seed, flower and twig fall onto the roof and into the gutters every week of the year, which in this climate is not litter so much as compost sitting on your building.

Put those together and Edge Hill produces the fastest biological regrowth in the city. On a shaded wall under a mature tree you can be looking at a green haze within a year of a clean. That is not a failed clean, it is the conditions, and a shaded block here is on a shorter cycle than a coastal one and always will be.

Gutters are the upstream cause of a lot of wall staining. A gutter packed with wet leaf holds water against the fascia, overflows in a downpour, and sends organic runoff down the wall in exactly the streaks people ring up about. Cleaning the wall and leaving the gutter full is cleaning the symptom.

Painted weatherboard is soft wash only

A large share of the housing here is old Cairns: timber Queenslanders on stumps, VJ and chamferboard, single skin walls, batten and lattice underneath, corrugated iron roofs. Many have been renovated to a high standard, and many carry decades of accumulated paint.

None of that goes anywhere near high pressure. A lance on painted weatherboard does three things, all bad. It drives water up under the laps into the wall cavity where it has no way out. It strips paint at the edges and anywhere adhesion has already started to fail. And on soft old hardwood or hoop pine it raises the grain, leaving a furred surface that holds dirt worse than before you started.

The correct method is a soft wash: low pressure, a solution suited to the paint, dwell time, then a controlled rinse. On anything with flaking paint or exposed timber, the honest answer may be to leave it until it is repainted, because washing it will only accelerate what is already happening.

Access is half the job

Edge Hill was subdivided long before anyone imagined a two car garage. Driveways are narrow, side access is often under a metre wide with a fence on one side and an air conditioning unit on the other, and elevated Queenslanders put the roofline high on a block that may also be sloping.

That is not a complaint, it just changes how the work is staged. Gear gets carried rather than driven in, hose runs are longer, and roof work on a steep old iron roof needs proper access rather than a ladder and optimism.

Getting an assessment

Because so much depends on what the surface actually is, Edge Hill jobs are worth looking at in person rather than pricing off a description. Send a photo of the worst wall and one of the side access, or call 07 4028 4268 and describe the age of the house first.