Pressure Washing Mareeba

Nothing here behaves like the coast

Almost everything that makes exterior cleaning in Cairns a mould problem stops at the top of the Kuranda Range. Mareeba sits several hundred metres up on the drier western side, out of the rainforest and into dry tropical savanna. It receives a fraction of the coastal rainfall, most of it compressed into a short wet, and the winter and spring stretch is genuinely dry, hot in the afternoon and windy.

So algae is a minor player here. What builds instead is dust. Red brown mineral dust lifted off unsealed roads, headlands, paddocks and machinery, carried by the afternoon breeze and then bonded onto render, glass, Colorbond and window screens by the next light shower. It is a film, not a growth, and it flattens a colour long before anyone would call the house dirty. People often assume their render has faded when it has simply been dust glazed for three seasons.

Bore water leaves its own signature

The second Mareeba specific problem is the water itself. Plenty of properties in and around the irrigation area run bore or channel water through sprinklers and washdown lines, and that water carries iron and mineral load. Over a season you get orange staining fanned across concrete paths, driveways, fence panels and the lower metre of walls wherever a sprinkler throws. Glass and shed cladding pick up scale and mineral haze for the same reason.

Iron staining is not dirt and pressure will not remove it. It has to be treated chemically, and how well it comes out depends entirely on how long it has been baking into the surface. Fresh staining usually clears completely. Years of it on porous concrete may only lighten, and that is worth knowing before you agree to anything rather than afterwards.

Sheds, aprons and hardstand

Mareeba jobs are rarely just a house. Blocks are bigger and the work usually takes in a shed, a concrete apron, a machinery pad, a packing shed floor or the approach to a cool room. Mango and avocado country brings its own mess: fruit stain and sap dried onto concrete, plus the black sooty deposit that builds under fruit trees and lifts easily once you recognise what it is. Properties out toward Biboohra, Walkamin and Dimbulah add diesel, hydraulic oil and rubber marking on hardstand, and that is a degreasing job before it is a washing job.

Getting up the range

Mareeba is roughly an hour from base, so we batch Tablelands work by day rather than running the range for one small item. Write down everything you want looked at, house, shed, driveway, fences, tanks, and it costs nothing extra in travel to do the lot in one visit. Call 07 4028 4268 and tell us what is on the block.