Last week, Cynthia and David took some time away from overseeing day-to-day operations at the shop to head to the annual Pressure Washers of North America (PWNA) conference in Orlando, Florida. PWNA is the leading national organization representing our industry by promoting safety, quality, and professionalism through education and networking opportunities with fellow members from across the country. This year, they teamed up for the first time with the International Window Cleaning Association (IWCA) to focus on a wide range of exterior cleaning demos, hands-on training, workshops and networking.

We picked up a lot of good information the training sessions and were able to meet with a number of vendors at the tradeshow to get close up looks at their latest equipment, chemical and service offerings. Maybe the most productive part of the trip was finding ample opportunities to meet and chat with many fellow business owners who shared tips and tricks on improving our services and growing our business. These few short days inspired a number of plans to add new and improved services to our repertoire in the coming weeks and months.  We are very excited to share the details as the pieces come together. All in all, it was a very productive trip.

But the icing on the cake came as the last day of the trade show wrapped up. PWNA gives away a number of prizes throughout the event each year, with the “grand prize” being an excellent hot water pressure washing skid manufactured by Hydro Tek. It’s a top professional quality unit designed to last for years of high stress daily use. Units like this cost several thousand dollars a piece – well worth the cost for a company like ours when reliability and durability matters. But in the case, we won’t have to spend that money because we were the lucky winners of the drawing. The headline photo above was taken while we were still in the initial shock of our good fortune. PWNA President Clint Reynolds is behind and above us along with some of the fine folks of PSI Pro Group, who donated the skid for the drawing. We are eagerly looking forward to it’s arrival in Colorado so we can add it to our inventory and start putting it to work cleaning our customers’ vehicles and property.

Call us today if you have unwanted graffiti on your property – or if you need some other clean up that our pressure washing professionals can tackle.

And when we’re finished, we always appreciate reviews and comments about our service – whether handwritten like Marlene’s or through Google Reviews, the Better Business Bureau or another digital platform.

Recently, we set up a profile on BlueSky, one of the latest social media apps vying to become the next Twitter (now known as X). I started searching around the site for other pressure washing companies to see what they’re doing on the app but didn’t find many, which makes sense because BlueSky hasn’t been around all that long. What I did find were a lot of mentions of Power Wash Simulator – a video game where – as you might guess by the title – the sole goal of the game is to clean things with a pressure washer.

I had heard of the game when it first came out a couple years ago. But I’m a few years older than most folks who play video games and we keep pretty busy pressure washing in the real world, so I haven’t really had the time or desire to play with it. In the meantime, it seems to have become rather popular in the gaming world.  New York Times Magazine and Vice have published articles about it. And since things slow down around here as the cold sets in outside, I figured the time has come to set up an account on Steam to give it a try.

The first thing I noticed is that there’s no water runoff. You can spray as much as you want and things get clean – but the dirty water magically vanishes and never goes anywhere. If you were washing a van like this in a garage, you’d soon have a muddy mess all over the floor. In the real world, you need to make sure your runoff water isn’t going somewhere that will create an issue or run down a storm drain when it shouldn’t. The game doesn’t address any of that.

While we’re talking about what happens when water goes where it shouldn’t, there’s the issue of what happens when you spray things that shouldn’t be sprayed. In the game, you can aim your high pressure water stream at the lightbulb in the ceiling or at an uncovered electric outlet with no negative repercussions whatsoever.  Try that in the real world and you’ll find out quickly why that’s a bad idea. In Muckingham, apparently there is some magic that only allows water to do anything to objects that have dirt on them.

But the thing that made me give up on the game pretty quickly is the lack of serious repercussions that come from using the wrong pressure tip or chemical. In the game, changing the tips or chemicals only really adjusts how deeply or quickly things get clean. In the real world, using too narrow of a stream at too high pressure, or using the wrong chemical for type of mess you are trying to remove from the type of surface that the mess is on – and you can cause real damage that will make things much worse — and much more expensive — than the original mess you were trying to clean up.

Don’t get me wrong. I realize that this is just a game and the whole point is to unwind and have some fun. In that way, Power Wash Simulator reminds me a lot of Guitar Hero.  When it was released 20 years ago, I jumped onto the band wagon and spent countless hours playing with the toy controller with the 5 colored buttons on the fret bar and the rock switch strummer. It was the only game I could beat my kids at.  But it had very little relationship to being a real musician. Just like being good at Madden won’t make you a football star and Call of Duty doesn’t match the real world danger of being a soldier.

Power Wash Simulator is just fine for what it is and a lot of people find it to a be a great way to relax and unwind from the stress of the day. In fact, a study found that it can be good for your mental health. There’s something about watching things get clean that some people really enjoy. While I didn’t get too far into the gameplay myself, I understand that really starts to get interesting in the higher levels when you encounter more otherwordly objects to clean. But actually cleaning real things in the real world can be much more stressful and complicated.  A lot of things need to be considered to the job correctly, efficiently – and most importantly – SAFELY.

This morning before our crews headed out for the day, we took a little time to celebrate one of our own. Armando Nava-Hernandez was hired by Wash On Wheels’ original owner – James Ulatowski – in December 2004. His 20 years with Wash On Wheels has spanned several economic cycles of challenges and success. Many other employees, managers – and even owners – have come and gone while Armando has remained a reliable and dedicated part of our team.

Armando plans to be with us for some time to come and is a proud example of what we all strive for – on-time and excellent service for all our customers.

Give us a call today for a free quote to discuss how he – and/or all of our other dedicated professionals – can help you with your pressure washing needs.

Police departments utilize holding cells in their facilities to process people they’ve arrested before transferring them to longer term jail facilities. As you might imagine, these small, confined spaces are designed for security and efficient operations – not comfort. They can experience heavy traffic and quickly accumulate dirt, bodily fluids, and other contaminants.

Recently, we were contacted by the city of Littleton to wash out their holding area. They were looking for a general wash down of the area to enhance the routine cleaning that is regularly performed by their staff. We needed to coordinate with their schedule to be there during a time when the facility wasn’t in use and to get in and out as quickly as possible to minimize the disruption to their operations.

After the preparation process was complete, the cleaning itself went smoothly.  We pressure washed the walls, floors, and seating areas using soap to scrub some areas as needed. The rooms had working drains into the sanitary sewer system where the wastewater could go.

Our experienced crew was able to efficiently clean the entire area in a relatively short amount of time to minimize the disruption while creating a safe and sanitary environment for everyone within the facility in a way that was both effective and time-efficient.

After the relatively nice fall we’ve had, this storm was a reminder of the challenges of pressure washing vehicles in the winter. Magnesium chloride and other de-icing chemicals that are sprayed on the roadways coat vehicles with a nasty film that requires extra scrubbing to clean. And while appearance is important, keeping trucks clean is vital to keep them running at their peak performance. Storms like this cause a lot of extra muck to get stuck up under the wheel wells,  behind the cabs of semi-tractors, and in other areas that need to be clean for drivers and maintenance crew to keep the trucks up to DOT specs.

Graffiti removal is one of our favorite things to do. Occasionally, we run into really tough jobs that are difficult or impossible to fix. But, by using the right techniques with the proper chemicals, we usually can make unwanted tags disappear like they never happened. When the job is done right, it really gives us the satisfaction of making our community a cleaner and more attractive place to live, work, and play. One key to a successful outcome is to let a professional work on the job from the start. If someone doesn’t know what they are doing, they can actually make the problem worse by driving the graffiti paint too deep into the surface to completely remove. In the worst case scenario, they can seriously damage the property they were trying to clean.

Here are few examples where we weren’t called until AFTER someone else tried to remove the graffiti first.

So, while the property owner saved money by taking advantage of the city’s service. They certainly got what they didn’t pay for.

After the city’s free paint job, the property owner called us to remove the paint from the window and door glass and frames. At this point, instead of removing only the graffiti tags, we also needed to remove the paint layer that the city added as well, so the job ended up taking more time (at more expense) than we would have charged for the same areas in the first place.

And, sadly, the end result was not as good as what we would have been able to do if we had tackled the job from the start.

He did call us back after a couple weeks. But, said that in the intervening days they had someone else try to remove the graffiti who “made about 1/3 of one of the walls better.” He asked us to come out and remove the rest, and was hopeful that maybe we could charge less because the work the other person did.

When we arrived, this is what we found. Whoever it was that tried the removal, obviously used a “zero tip” and the highest pressure they could get to try to simply blast the graffiti off the wall. While that certainly removed some of the paint, it also removed layers of the concrete from the wall as well, causing substantial damage.

We were able to remove the remaining graffiti paint from the walls. But we couldn’t do anything about the damage that was done by the other pressure washer. A portion of the tagger’s “art” is now permanently etched into the wall. And the owners didn’t end up saving any money.

As small business owners ourselves, especially in this economic climate, we certainly understand the need to control costs wherever you can. But sometimes being penny wise can end up being pound foolish. Before you consider tackling a graffiti removal job on your own – consider whether you have the tools and experience to properly handle the cleanup yourself. We think you’ll find that it would be more cost-effective in the long run – with a much better aesthetic result – to hire a professional like Wash On Wheels who has has years of experience cleaning up graffiti all over the Front Range.

Enclosures Need Regular Maintenance

This enclosure with a trash compactor and grease trap serves a small shopping center with a couple of restaurants in Arvada. We clean it once a month with our special degreasing chemical and pressure washing services. It’s amazing how fast the mess starts to reaccumulate after each service. 

We service trash and dumpster enclosures like this all over the Denver and Boulder metro area. Give us a call today if you manage property with a enclosure that needs to be cleaned.

Graffiti taggers are nothing if not persistent.

Graffiti taggers often work regardless of the weather, showing a real dedication to marking their territory and spreading their message. Colorado’s cold winters, snow, or rain usually won’t deter them, and they often find creative ways to adapt. This persistence can make it tough for businesses and communities to keep their walls and spaces clean.

We can clean up the mess – even in less-than-ideal conditions.

When it comes to removing unwanted art – one size does not fit all. It takes experience to know how to properly deal with different kinds of paint on different surfaces. “Off-the-shelf” products often don’t totally remove the paint and can sometimes make the problem worse. They can leave “shadows” or blotchy spots that can be very difficult or even impossible to remove later. This is especially true in the winter months when the cold temperatures can prevent chemicals from working as well as they were designed to do.

Check out this graffiti removal job we did in Denver this week

As you can see in the before and after photos below, taggers covered a lot of wall area on this building. The job required several different professional strength chemicals and techniques to properly remove. It wasn’t quick – the chemicals need more time to do their magic when it’s cold outside. And it’s not cheap – but we think you’re agree that the results are worth the cost of hire a professional to do the job right.