MMI Enterprises

The sq. ft. result of Russels method would be out of range of other bidders if the rate was towards a higher avg. of around $1. In such case of using that method it might not be wise to leave the figures on the table but rather to just leave the end quote amount for the customer. Get too much into distractive talk about sq. ft. with customer and then someone's integrity at measuring will come to question and they confused. It really in the end is all about customer deciding on the end amount and having a good understanding or expectation of what your doing to their surfaces.

to be one of the 100.... I'd also use my 225gpm pump to rinse them all at once if not for ordinance laws....haha

For the wood I am liking the deckcare.org For overall everything to do with pressure washing and equipment I like Delco bbs For some obscure equipment schematics and insight I like Hotwaterwizard ...although hardly anyone goes there anymore I can fix anything on my machine and make my own surface cleaner through there..

Adrian, How many gpm flow you running through xjet and what orfice size to get that 40' peak? I know I can't consider getting the ratio of chemical you got up there with a downstreamer but am interested in figuring out exactly what orfice size might put me up that high. I am a bit shy of that with running 5gpm and smaller hose bib (? orfice size) as tip. An 0008.0 tip aerosols out on me with too much pressure and haven't yet tried any 0030.0 or 0040.0 sized tips. Anyone got the orfice size? With that info I can use nozzle chart to see what it translates into nozzle # for my machine..

In reading back through this I learn so much yet can not decide on pricing... Seems Larry is at $.90, Ken at $1.35 , etc., etc. .. Some say use 3, some say use 4 as multiplier for railing linear ft... Then we got Russell suggesting a rail easy way with his add 6ft. method. Works out to 672sq. ft. on Larry's 300' floor spaced (500 tot) deck. So it becomes real easy how sq. ft. price poll is way subjective to methods of guestamating..Russels sq. ft. calculation method would result in a sq.ft price of $.67 cents.....huge differences here.. I really like the guestamating suggestion mixed with them 5 things to think about in a business model... Awesome thread!!

Know what is just as bad as customer fainting is when you faint from hearing what they expected to pay.... When I ask my own frugal lady to look at something and tell me how much she would pay she comes in anywheres from 32 cent to 80 cent depending on all sorts of irrational ideas like..."the item is worth more..I'de do it myself...well cause it goes up 8 ft. so you would need ladder".. AllI can say to her is "ok, go buy a gal of oil and get back to me then"

Smart and beautiful to boot..right on..a big thumbs up!!

I wouldn't say they are junk for their intended purpose but that folks are under a false impression of how fast them lower gpm machines can do some jobs or how long the direct drive pumps, or accesories might last. Our commercial pumps are belt driven, built to last or be rebuilt, and satisfy many types of PWing. They can easily cost more then the machine discussed here. Although I regularly see plenty of home owners using cold washers in my neighborhood I don't forget to notice they spend hours and hours in just doing their drives and walks for them to look like a zebra. In the real world time is money so when a professionals machine has a problem that changes it's effectivness down to one of them 4 gpm or under machines they usually fix right away. Now plenty of painters prep with them small cold water washers from the box stores and they are the bread and butter of sales most likely for the stores. But thing to remember is if you'll notice they are up on dangerous ladders and are fully prepared to work with the result of what would normally be considered damage from too much pressure. If it weren't for post PWing sanding tasks and painting tasks already planned it would be a mistake to consider using them washers as they do on a house or it's trim areas. They use them to remove loose paint and some dirt prior to painting and is a whole other animal to considered compared to a home owner being allowed on the hose to do more harm then good. Also there are the plenty of gas stations sending their cheap labor out at night with them cold machines to mesh around with. I can testify how their results are kin to a horror show in them commercial situation. Not uncommon to see a guy out doing a 4k sq ft. pad for the better part of an 8 hour shift and yet gum and grease is still everywhere or there are pencil marks or vebra stripes all about. They don't get gum or grease in a commercial situation worth a darn without chemical and heat.

Just ignore that cause your wood is already satisfactory far as cleaning the old dead grey mush off the surface. Your actually using the acids to brighten and to actually go from alkaline to acidic. Your not just neutralizing and are after the brightening aspects of the acid. I like what your doing in this cause it helps to control the myth of how one might clean better then the other. Far as mold coming back I don't know for sure but imagine that pc is a good enough sanitizer that it won't survive. It isn't strong enough at the strength I used to disolve 1" algae like chlorine of the 'apple sauce' mix might but I think it dead enough. The tsp isn't something to shake a stick at either. Painters been using it forever prior to painting and I heard something over the years about it was used heavily in the whaling industry to bleach whale bones..?? But don't get me wrong as I am not advocating using it in the residentail HO market. I don't know sufficiently what it does to wood.(maybe an anchient deck hand on a whaler cound say or ma ladies flowers..time will tell) ..oh and no I got no darkening effects from the pc or rather the mix I used, only nice light original looking wood..

I been adding info to a ph chart I ran across..feel free to add info or adjust for own use. Chemicals are complex and are not always absolutely at these ph's due to processes that could have been performed to them for specific industry use. Tried to range them as bit best I could tell though and added some generic names and brand info. umm err..how come I can't seem to upload any file formats??

Tweak it if ya want but by all means don't quote it as set in stone cause chems can change depending on many factors.. ph of common chemicals.pdf

Not sure yet what the tsp will do to windows at the ratio I did. I did 8 oz. percarb, 3 oz tsp, .5 oz apple blossom, and .5 oz borax to 1 gal. and flojetted it on for a dwell of 15 minutes.. the reaction and cling was perfect for my taste. A very mild application of either acid after would be fine to make perfect for staining. That mix is almost same as 'apple sauce' for roofs but without the chlorine. It stripped aged acrylic floor finish just fine the other night... I'll post up the ph level chart I was working on to the chemical section on how the two acids differ.. I see either as just as harmfull to fish along with ph being different.

Irony has it that prior to seeing this thread this early afternoon I did just that but I did it with PC,TSP,apple blossom, and borax... is almost good enough to accept stain...lol Oh and BTW, the amount of grey after a year was same on all boards.

Rick, I say to rinse before the staining part. The two chems are likely to leave differing amounts of soft fiber that you can scrape off cause they likely burn different and deeper, and probably one keeps on burning with time or more sun. Oxalic gets whiter faster and more so on crete then the citric and I suspect it will have some similar effect on the wood along same lines when still active. If you stop the action of both by rinsing as well as you can then you can confirm more important things. Whether or not the wood became changed or any more porous deeper on in and would be immedietly seen by stain absorbtion. Leaving it on could say more about down the road effects of which might be better to rinse off prior to sealing..Is not my bag to leave a reaction happening unchecked on anything so I am out of line in speaking on this really. I would rather know which absorbs more after using a citric mix or an oxalic mix meant to be washed off cause they have cleaners in them and but this is apparently more about which to leave in the wood or not. I call a manufacture claim that one is worse then the other to use (clean with) is subjective to whether their product is going to be left on or not.

Seymore, I think he's trying to figure out if oxalic wood takes more stain and adhears different is all....

H.O. 'ers should get what engine they like and the highest gpm they can afford without thinking psi..Then again.. if they just think psi we keep more work via the machine never getting used or wood damage... where's my balance beam? p.s. think cuzco had much better deal today when I walked through testing their food samples...

This is way old but I am interested in how it went.. I have these in my kitchen and exterior patio..they are often refered to as Mexican tile....They do not come with a glaze persay far as I usually saw and were applied originally across the country as if they were to have their pores open. When it comes time to clean they respond well to standard degreasers and the grout respond well to citric acid and last years and years with a natural look and no top coat. Problem is though they show every bit of dirt and require too much cleaning. Method is either mop or autoscrub with mild strato grit type brush as you must get into the grout and you must pick water up...well if not the water just goes straight down into slab and evaporates just fine on backup with dirt and chemicals. When I got tired of the cleaning all the time I tried a few high solid acrylic finishes first and they were just absorbed right off and made cleaning no easier. So then I used some conversion varnish followed up by the acrylics and bamm they looked hot for the past year. The kids got a new sandbox about 3 weeks back and proceded to go ahead and create me a nice traffic lane on the kitchen when their trikes tracked it in. Couple more weeks I am stripping it all off and redoing with catalyzed poly before top coating.. Mine are pretty robust far as being able to scrub with low speed machine. Have even ran 100 grit sand screens on them to smooth corners and edges of individual tiles so that I could run a soft padded propane burnisher on them..haha, yup I do grocery stores at night then come home and polish my kitchen with a 200 lb machine..lol P.S. I consider it a restoration level of work cause to do perfectly you will end up with some amount of the clay coming off and possably some scratches left to sand out or fill in. The black 3M hipro pads (thin open weave) are the best to really get clean though(or to strip vinyl..btw). Sand screens can be had at the big box store if you want to really get in there. Not Behr low lustre...slippery as all get out. Not white mountain..lasts less then a year under sun.

Well is this going to be pure oxalic & citric crystal at same percentage? I have no experience with testing the two on ipe or how a stain would hold differently but from my tests on 20 year old fir and cedar on both spa and fence over the last year I can confirm that the oxalic removed the gray and calcium much faster and was better at showing the original natural wood color. I know it is aside from the tests your going to do concerning stain but isn't it pretty darn important to get to the point of a real even look let alone prior to leaving for a night of dry time of worrying about if stain/seal is going to look decent on it? I think the claim of differing spread ratio results is very possable but that it is likely to be more geared around incomplete removal or leach out in general of the dead stuff and rinse methods. I would like to see the staining results of 4 tests between the two acid with 2 of the tests using a garden hose fan rinse and the other 2 using just less then fur damage. I'de almost bet that only one would be more prone to being able to scrape off a fingernail full of dead stuff that logic says changes the stain absorbtion.

When I think of dice I think of sculling...

Ask the bush from last night.

{singing} It's all coming back to me now.. In school they would have told us to change C to fraction, then multiply across both the top and bottom and then devide the fraction back to whole number......Feels like grade school again...thanx Philip.... I'll probably print and paste the formula to my machinery since the math will deal with products of any % , or any gal. amount, or tank size that I might want to dilute down. Doesn't Osh have a tad higher % SH in 2 gal. boxes? muriatic and bleach both I believe..

1.5 x 5 gal. bucket = .6249 gal.of bleach per 5 gal. bucket -------12 anyone got the keystrokes to show it right?

Philip, So please verify... we take c (desired tank percentage) x the flipped fraction t (desired tank volume) over b (starting bleach percentage) ? Formula being C x (t/b) ..And both our "/" within the "()" are really supposed to be a flat fraction sign?..... My lady had me all confused this morning wanting me to think ratio of 3:1 and I just knew that a math teacher would want us to just flip or convert to fractions to multiply or some such thing... This stuff confuses the heck outta me...arggghhh p.s. ... In practice I could just count off on my fingers how many half cuts it took to get to the end desired % I want and use that figure x the desired %... p.s. ... well nope that don't work hu...lol

Your like at 1.5% bleach after your first cut in tank. (before downstreaming or xjetting) Surely there is better way to write it but for liquid 12%SH ya figure something like this: b(12%) / t (tank size)= gp (per gal. %) , then take c (1.5% desired cleaning percentage) / gp= b gal. of bleach to add to tank so for a 1.5% mix of 12% bleach in a 35 gal. tank it be such: 12/35=.3428571 , then 1.5/.3428571= 4.350005 gal. ....Hey folks, please forgive if this is wrong and there be a better way to figure. I don't know how to write equations.. I suck at math!! argghh

after reading more then half this torturous thread..I think I'll stay away from calling someone for explaination as I might be belittled or might even not become more educated from said phone call.But anyways......Daniel do you think the use of absolute language can actually speak to and be interpritted better by ears that might be uneducated on processes that should be used while handling chemicals? For instance..When I speak to a child I adjust my skills in a way that the child can understand as the child needs discipline and they deal in absolutes. When speaking to a child I speak as a child with my best adult judgement and their safety at heart. In my business I often speak absolutes to customers when dealing with their maintenance procedures cause I usually make early attempt to understand their abilities or knowledge and I have adult discriminitive ability. The moment I know they are uneducated on process or amounts they can use of a chemical I have to deem them irrresponsable enough to use the chemical at all until they are. I can relate this to my usual speal of how freedom without responsability is anarchy..Anarchy will blow ya up,poison ya, or pretty much ruin everything. So what ya think about exceptions to the usual advice of not speaking in absolutes???,, :) Phrases like "such as" like you used above are so important but can be ignored by some..aren't they?..