$600 for what type of service? I don’t know your region or the size of the wall involved but for pure cleaning service $600 sounds high. If the $600 includes cleaning, prep and sealing then that might be right. But keep in mind if you are getting prep and sealing (or even painting) then that’s a lot more service than just a simple cleaning.
Have you tried to get an estimate for just a simple high pressure cleaning?
Get rid of that crap and get wood! It never molds, only mosses up, and moss can be sprayed off if you don’t want it there.
Yeah, because nothing says “low maintenance” quite like wood.
Borrowed a neighbor’s power washer - 1650 PSI electric.
I didn’t get over to the siding yet, just working on some guttering on the front of the house that was moldy. Overall, I wasn’t impressed. The pressure washer didn’t really work unless you get the nozzle about 6 inches from the target surface, and even then, it only takes off about 60% of the mold (i.e. there’s still some residue left that really doesn’t want to come off).
Then I got up on a ladder and rubbed it with a brush, and it loosened right up, and the loose stuff was easy to spray off for pretty much 100% cleanliness (or maybe ~95%).
I’m gonna scout out the hardware store for a scrub brush that I can attach to a 6+ foot handle…
You should be aware that depending on the type of vinyl (mainly related to age) you may never get the mold completely “off” because the mold can infiltrate the siding. If there’s mold growing a few mm into the siding, it will never come clean, and will always show.
If you can find some of the siding that’s low enough to address, try there and see if having the nozzle right up there is sufficient to truly clean it. If, despite your best efforts and cleaning solutions, you can’t clear it up there, chances are the mold’s been growing long enough to have infiltrated the siding. (That’s not a particularly hard thing for organics to do to plastics like vinyl, though it depends on the type of vinyl, preparation, etc…)
So I went to the hardware store and bought a brush on a 6 foot handle, and a second on a handle that telescopes to 16 feet (pretty cool). The 6 footer is more convenient to the extent that I’m working on low areas, as it’s lighter and a bit more rigid (i.e. easier to put pressure on and really scrub), but being able to alternate to the long one was nice.
With these, I was able to get most of the stuff off. Basically - rinse the siding to get it wet. Make one pass over it with the brush to scrub it, then rinse again. For the rinsing, I was using my regular hose on ‘jet’. This process got about 70-95% of the mold off (a few areas withstood scrubbing)
I also bought some anti-mold cleaning liquid that can feed into a pressure washer. I did a last pass with this, and it pretty much cleaned off the remaining 5-20% of the mold. I don’t think ‘pressure washing’ was the key here - I was spraying it on and washing it off on the low pressure setting most of the time.
So after I return the pressure washer to my neighbor, I think if I have to do this again, I’ll see if I can find something that I can attach to my hose to feed liquid into it - I think there is such a thing - and use that in conjunction with brushes. Excluding the visits to the hardware store, I spent 3-4 hours and got all the parts of the house that I cared about (the accessible/visible parts of the exterior).
Phil,
Lessons for the rest of us…
(Lesson seems to be: avoid vinyl siding, stick with the brick if I can…) :)