Driveway Pressure Washing in Brisbane

Nearly all of the darkening on a Brisbane driveway is organic. Algae, lichen and mould colonise the pores in the concrete and hold moisture, which makes the next colony easier to establish. That is why a slab left alone for five years looks disproportionately worse than one washed each year.

The rest is traffic and tree. Tyre rubber, brake dust, engine drips and the black scuff of a wheel turned on the spot sit on top of the organic layer. Overhanging figs, jacarandas and poincianas add leaf tannin, which stains a warm brown that most people mistake for dirt.

• Green and black algae film, heaviest on the shaded southern side of the house
• Lichen, the pale crusty rosettes that grip into the surface and need dwell time rather than force
• Tyre rubber and brake dust in the wheel tracks and at the turning point near the garage
• Oil, coolant and hydraulic drips, usually in a line where the car sits
• Leaf tannin from figs, jacarandas, poincianas and mango trees
• Red soil washed down off garden beds and driveway edges after a storm
• Efflorescence, the chalky white bloom that pushes up out of concrete and pavers

Most of what slows a driveway job down has nothing to do with the cleaning itself.

It is the tap that will not fill the machine, the padlocked gate, or the car nobody moved.

Water and power

We run off your outside tap and a standard power point.

A tap with poor flow will not keep a pressure washer fed. If yours dribbles rather than runs, tell us when you book and we will bring a buffer tank instead.

Getting to the slab

Gates, side access and a steep drive all change how we set up. Hoses have to reach from the tap to the far end, and on a sloped block we work top down so dirty water never runs back across a finished section.

Cars, bins and the street

Vehicles need to be off the slab, and ideally off the verge in front of it. Anything stored along the edge — pot plants, bikes, a trailer — is easier to shift before we arrive than around us.

A driveway wash puts a lot of water on the ground, and most driveways fall towards something — a garden bed, a fence line, or the street.

Garden beds and lawn

Cleaning solution is heavily diluted by the time it leaves the surface cleaner, but we still keep it off anything precious.

Beds along the edge are rinsed with clean water first so the soil is already wet and takes up less. Run-off is then pushed towards a path or the kerb rather than into the roots of a hedge.

Your neighbours' side

On a shared or boundary driveway the water goes somewhere that is not yours.

We work the fall so it does not run under a neighbour's gate, across their paving or into an open garage. Any overspray on their fence or wall gets rinsed off before we leave.

Debris is the other half of it. The grit, leaf matter and moss that comes off the slab gets swept up and taken away rather than flushed into the stormwater grate.

Most driveways come up better than the owner expected. It is still worth saying plainly what a wash cannot do, because the gap between a good result and a perfect one is usually chemistry and age rather than effort.

• Oil that soaked in years ago will lighten, sometimes a lot, but a shadow often remains — the stain is inside the concrete, not on it
• Tyre scuff burned into a soft slab at a turning point can be embedded in the surface itself
• Spalling, crazing and hairline cracks become visible again once the grime is gone; the clean reveals them rather than causing them
• Concrete faded by years of Queensland sun will not return to its original colour, because the change is in the material
• A failing old sealer looks blotchy under a clean and needs stripping rather than washing

We would rather tell you a stain will lighten than promise it will disappear and hand back a driveway that does not match the description.

If we can see before we start that a particular mark is unlikely to come out fully, we say so at the quote. That is a better conversation to have then than once the gear is packed away.

How long a clean lasts depends mostly on light and water. A north-facing driveway in full sun can look good for two or three years. The same slab under a fig on the southern boundary can green up inside a single wet season.

• Lift overhanging branches where you can — even a small increase in morning sun slows regrowth
• Keep leaf litter swept off, because a wet leaf mat is where growth starts
• Check that downpipes and garden beds are not sending soil or constant water across the slab
• Rinse oil drips away early; fresh oil comes up far more easily than oil that has sat through a summer
• Consider sealing if the slab is porous and you are tired of the cycle