Do you dread hearing the words "the patio needs pressure washing soon" or "the decks getting pretty green and slippery"?Most people do because cleaning the patio or deck can be a real pain in the back, take ages and create nearly as much dirt as it was meant to clean up! Pressure washers were a revolution in outdoor cleaning, allowing things to be cleaned that previously were left to their own devices.
Decks would gradually turn green and be dangerously slippery when damp.
Paved areas and patios would quickly look old and past their best.
Domestic Pressure washers, introduced in 1984 by Karcher in Germany (incidentally a few years after inventing the first hot water pressure machine, Alfred Karcher died of a heart attack in 1959 aged just 58, his wife Irene carried on building Karcher into what it is today) made the renovation of many outside areas simple and cheap.
However, there was a downside to this miraculous (and who of us has not marveled at the cleaning power and transformation of the area under the lance's powerful spray?) machine and that is splash-back.
Splash-back can drench the operator and splash dirty water up walls, doors and even windows, creating more work to finish the job.
Pressure Washers work by utilizing many many pounds per square inch of pressure to produce a powerful jet of water.
This hits the patio or decking surface blasting off the dirt..
..
the problem is that all that dirty water has to go somewhere.
All over the place usually! All that is a thing of the past with the new accessories being made by many manufacturers.
Karcher for example make several patio cleaning attachments.
These attachments typically utilize the high pressure of the water to turn a propeller like arm with the water escaping from the ends of the arm in a downwards direction.
This fast spinning blade creates a hovercraft effect allowing the user to simply hold the machine and move it from side to side over the area to be cleaned.
But the clever bit is the fact that the spinning arm is encased in a shroud that stops the majority of water from splashing back up to the user and her surroundings.
To use the T Racer you set up exactly as you would do for cleaning the area with your regular lance, fit the T-Racer, (the 300 model in this authors case) and carefully work your way over the areas to be cleaned.
How fast you go depends on:

1. How dirty the area is and when it was last cleaned.
   
2. The type of dirt that is to be removed, soil, algae, stains etc.
   
3. The size of your pressure washer.
   More pressure equals faster cleaning.
   
4. How intricate the areas are to be cleaned, multilevel and walled areas will take longer.
   

On an ideal flat paved area that lies flush with surrounding areas, the T Racer is all that you will need and it will clean everywhere.
If you have vertical sections however, like abutting walls, steps, edgings etc then you might need to use the lance to finish of these intricate areas.
Butting up to a wall will leave a tiny uncleaned border (the thickness of the casing on the attachment etc).
These are easily cleaned up with the regular lance.
You might find that the T-Racer 300 moves so much dirt so quickly that you will need to rinse it down towards your drained edges with a hosepipe as you go along! After working with a T Racer style patio cleaner, rinse off any remaining dirt, giving any standing patches of water a quick brush off to avoid stains as it dries out.
And remember, with outside areas, little and often is the best way to go.
Pressure washer attachments make cleaning easy and therefore there is no excuse to give those patios and decks a spruce up every few weeks.