Soft wash or pressure wash: which one does your house need?

People use the two words like they mean the same thing. They do not. Pressure washing cleans with force. Soft washing cleans with a solution and barely any pressure at all. The surface in front of you decides which one is correct, and getting it backwards is how a job goes from clean to expensive.

What pressure is actually for

Hard, flat, and non porous. Concrete driveways, walkways, patios, slabs. On those, pressure through a surface cleaner is the right tool, and the reason to use a surface cleaner rather than a wand is that it cleans in an even pass. A wand in the wrong hands leaves stripes across a driveway that show up worse after it dries than the dirt did.

What soft washing is for

Everything that would be damaged by force. Siding, painted wood, stucco, soffits, trim, and roofs. The cleaning solution does the work by killing the mold, algae, and mildew that are actually growing on the surface. That matters here, because in south Louisiana the black and green on a house is rarely dirt. It is living, and rinsing it off without killing it means it is back within months.

Roofs are never a pressure job

A shingle roof loses granules under pressure, and those granules are what protect the asphalt underneath from the sun. Strip them and you have shortened the life of the roof to make it look clean for a season. Roofs get a no pressure soft wash, always, no exceptions worth making.

The quick version

• Concrete, pavers, and slabs: pressure, through a surface cleaner
• Siding, stucco, painted wood, soffits: soft wash
• Shingles and tile: soft wash, no pressure on the surface
• Anything you are unsure about: assume soft wash until someone can tell you why not

If a company quotes you a roof and the word pressure comes up, ask what PSI they are putting on the shingles. The answer tells you whether they know the difference.