Preparing Deck for Washing

Greg Reveles: Hello, my name is Greg Reveles, I am with Renorr Dynamics. Today I am showing you how to properly and thoroughly clean your wood or composite deck. Right now I would like to show you how to properly prep your deck for cleaning, before we wash there a few things that we need to do such as looking over the deck and determining if you have a lot of debris in between the floorboards.

You might need to get in there with a thin utensil such as a 5-in-1 painter's tool, maybe an old butter knife, you are going to do that first. The next thing that we want to do is to moisten the deck and get it ready for applying the wood pre-treatment chemical. You want the wood decks to be moist but you don't want them to have puddling or pounding of water because then that will prevent the pre-treatment from getting to the wood.

I highly recommend whether you own one or rent one using a gasoline powered pressure washer. Now, it is time to apply the pre-treatment. I recommend using a powdered oxygen-based pre-treatment chemical. It is very commonly available under many names, mix it with warm water, mix that in a large five gallon bucket, stir it around and set that aside while you are setting up your equipment and doing site assessment that takes about 20 to 30 minutes for it to dissolve.

Once that has happened, you take your pump up garden sprayer, pour the pre-treat into the pump-up garden sprayer and that is a way that you will apply the pre-treatment to your pre-moistened deck. Now be very generous in your application of the pre-treatment. You want to put it on very heavily, it is an inexpensive product, it is very safe for the environment, it is safe for your bushes. It is a very gentle product.

As you apply you are going to notice that there is a bit of foaming action that is telling you that it is working for your average deck you are going to mix about one half to one container for about two-and-a-half to five gallons of pre-treat. This should be sufficient to cover almost every, every deck.

The dwell time is about 10 to 15 minutes and then you are okay to begin the pressure washing with your gasoline powered pressure water. We are now done prepping our deck for cleaning, now let us move onto deck washing.