Pressure washing services you can add on.
A great service you can offer to perform when you can’t mow due to rain, is pressure washing. Getting started offering this service shouldn’t be that difficult and it can help your business expand outwards. One lawn care business owner was looking to get into power washing and had a few questions about getting started that he posted on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum.
He wrote “I want to start getting into offering concrete pressure washing services. I think by adding a service to pressure wash driveways I will be able to make more profits out of my current customer base but I am not sure on a few issues. Can anyone tell me what too charge per Sq Ft? I’m also considering purchasing a mechanical concrete cleaner. Is this a good idea?”
Another lawn care business owner shared “I am located in Central Florida and I offer pressure Washing to my clients. You can offer many services when you have a pressure washer. I offer to clean driveway, sidewalk, whole house (from grass to soffett), pool area, screen enclosures and patios (wood or concrete).
A great tool that helps out a lot when doing the driveway is a buffing machine or a surface cleaner. It cuts down on the time spent on site, makes the job so much easier and in the end makes it more profitable. If you use chlorine to help clean the area, buy it from a pool supply store in the 2.5 gallon container. Dilute it with water when you add it to your sprayer to pre-treat the area you are about to clean.
pressure washing surface cleaner
The costs I charge are as followed”
1. Driveway / Sidewalk .10 per sq. foot (Avg. size DW 12’ x 100’ SW 4’ x 50’ ) Generally most of the jobs I do are about the same size. I don’t measure all the time and charge $150 per job.
2. Whole House $150 - $200 per house (grass to soffit) Avg. house 2000 – 3000 sq. ft.
3. Pool Area / Screen Enclosure depending on size $75 pool area $150 pool & enclosure. If there is mildew on the aluminum enclosure and requires scrubbing and getting on a latter, then I add $50- $75 more to the cost.
4. Patios / Decks Concrete or Wood 10’x 50’ size $50 - $75
I hope this helps you out. My prices may be high or low in your area but it works for me where I am at and I make a good profit for the amount of time I spend doing these jobs.
A surface cleaner can be used on any hard flat surface. You just need to know your machine and the surface being cleaned and adjust accordingly. DO NOT use this on wood unless you want to do a lot of sanding. Asphalt is softer than concrete so it requires less pressure.
It has multiple spray nozzles underneath that rotate under a shroud that cleans faster than you can with a wand. I have used them to clean sidewalks where it took me 1 minute and 40 seconds to clean that would have taken 15 to 30 minutes with a wand. With the surface cleaner you can clean an average sized driveway in under 30 minutes. After you clean all you do is rinse the water off the surface and you are done. That is unless you have a recovery system that negates the need to rinse because it picks up all the dirty water. It is kind of like a mower blade with a spray nozzle at each end of the blade spinning at a high rate of speed.
At another job site I cleaned a strip mall, it had 18,000 sq ft of concrete. I used one surface cleaner and had a man rinsing behind me and removing the gum. It took about 5 1/2 hours… to me that’s pretty fast! On this job it equaled out to be just over $200 an hour
For those that are considering adding pressure washing you should see a demo of the equipment in use at a local dealer.
