Every soft wash includes a mixture of two things: water and bleach. While this serves as a powerful base, there are other chemicals you can apply to the mix to make the most out of every wash no matter the surface. Some chemicals can even be applied after the fact to prevent damage and clean things up.
Enhancing Your Wash with Surfactants
The purpose of bleach in your soft wash mixture is to remove fungal or unwanted plant growths that might be clinging to the surface you are washing. Unfortunately, it’s not very capable of cleaning dirt and other substances stuck there. Between the water, bleach, and pressure, you might be able to get rid of some dirt, but there is no guarantee. To remedy this, surfactants can be used to empower your wash.
Surfactants, also known as surface-acting agents, do a variety of things to help your wash clean a surface. For vertical surfaces, surfactants will keep the mixture from sliding down the surface, keeping you from needing to re-apply the mixture over and over again. By reducing the surface tension of the mixture, surfactants help the solution spread more evenly throughout a surface, allowing you to use less of the mixture to cover the same amount of space. Like dish soap, these chemicals will also draw out dirt and trap them within the mixture so that surfaces can be cleaned in a more thorough manner. When it comes to soft washing, surfactants have become normalized and necessary when putting chemicals together to get the best mixture for cleaning.
Keeping the Smell Under Control
Thanks to COVID-19, bleach is being used now more than ever. As useful as this chemical is against viruses and in soft washes, it is also accompanied by a rather unpleasant smell. To save everyone from this stinky consequence, you can add odor maskers to your mixture.
These can remove that strong bleach smell and even replace it with a more pleasant scent based on the product you purchase. You can make your wash smell like apples, lemons, and even cherries. Odor maskers will also mask the smell of other substances should the need arise around the house. With it, you can wash your home and benefit from a fresh, clean scent.
Protecting the Plants
When using bleach in soft washes, one must be careful about any surrounding plant life around the area you plan to wash. If you don’t, you will end up killing all your plants by the time you are done washing. Using neutralizing chemicals can prevent you from causing any damage to the surrounding wildlife.
While you can use a soft washing system to apply a neutralizer, it is important you do so after you’ve washed a surface. As the name implies, the chemical will neutralize the bleach and other chemicals that may harm the plants. If you mix it in with the chemicals you use to wash, you will ruin the whole mixture.
All this chemical needs is water and a way to apply it. Some if not most neutralizers are even applicable to plants, so you can spray them directly as well as any other surface you might be trying to protect from bleach and other chemicals. It is important that you read the label of any chemical before you apply it though so make sure to do that before spraying.
Taking Your Soft Wash to the Next Level
With all of these chemicals at your disposal, your soft washing game will never be the same. By utilizing them all, you not only make your wash more effective at getting rid of dirt, but also keep things smelling fresh while protecting your yard from any chemical damage. Of course, if you’d like a professional soft wash or have any questions, you can always call us and we’d be more than happy to help.
