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Can anyone offer any advice please
Decking I work out how long roughly it will take to clean decking with stain priced per m2.
Tins should give you coverage guide. I always go for slightly below their coverage guide as it allows for slight errors!
Can't give any pricing guides, but we do fair bit of paving/car park cleaning and find the only way to get a consistemnt finish that doesn't look like a 'Tiger' pattern after a short while is to use a FSC attachement on the Power washer.
Also allows a more deterministic time to be calculated once you know the ability of your washer & attachment.
Worth investigating as an option for your washer ?
If your doing any amount of power washing a FSC seems to be the only really viable option for doing a good job commercially, have looked at it a couple of times in the last year or two seems you need to invest around £2000 in washer/FSC to get something half decent... Would you agree Gary?
The dedicated FSC washers are around that money - see a post a while ago were we hired one and was able to compare it to our 13hp Power Washer from Machine Mart with a £250ish FSC attachement.
When we need it, it's for large areas - like 50+space car parks. The Dedicated machine was about 10-20% faster than our attachement (due to size and ease of use).
If you're talking about modest domestic patios/decks then attachments for electric Nilfisk or Karcher units are not expensive.
What ever you use, you need to be able to moderate the pressure or angle of attack so as not to harm the surface (cheap, software decking being one of the easiest surface to harm).
Back to OP's question - I would suggest there are many variables without even considering indiviudal costs - such as access/surface/material/jet washer size, product coverage (each adds a level of uniqueness to the job)
cheers gary wil on be doing pressure washing smaller areas tbh nothing major planned just a little extra wing for us
eg :
http://www.amazon.co.uk/K%C3%A4rcher-T250-T-Racer-Patio-Cleaner/dp/...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Karcher-350-Wide-Surface-Cleaner/dp/B00QM9N...
I don't touch either with a barge pole now. Unless you've got really good kit, pressure washing is messy, takes twice as long to do and never looks great.
As for the treatments, in my bitter bitter experience, it covers half as much as it says on the tin, takes twice as many coats to get a decent finish and no customer really wants to pay what it costs to do it properly, so you end up losing money on it.....that's why I don't do it anymore!
other issues:- water based stains last no time at all before peeling off or generally looking rubbish. Oil based are better in my opinion, screw fix usually have some at reasonable money but large decks can get expensive. Choose weather when it can be all stained in one go, we had to do one last year in two parts and the colour looked completely different and ended up going over it twice. Remember - old ,maybe slightly rotten decking soaks up MUCH more stain than new.
Also, not nice on the old knees. Not a nice job and not very profitable. I agree with thermo - best avoided.
As always great advice from everyone