A driveway is the biggest piece of exterior concrete most people own. You stop seeing it until a visitor parks on it or the house goes up for sale, and then the green strip down the shaded side and the black patch under the car are all anyone looks at. Driveway pressure cleaning in Melbourne is straightforward work, but there is an order to it, and getting that order wrong is why some driveways come up patchy.
How driveway cleaning actually runs
The wand on its own is the slow way to do it. Held by hand it cleans a strip about as wide as your palm, and the overlap between passes shows as stripes once the concrete dries. That is the most common giveaway of a rushed job.
For flat work we use a surface cleaner. Surface cleaners are the round hooded attachments with jets spinning underneath, and they hold a fixed distance off the concrete so every square metre gets the same treatment. The finish comes up even and the water goes down rather than sideways across the neighbour’s fence.
Edges, expansion joints and anything the surface cleaners cannot reach get finished with the wand afterwards. Then the whole driveway gets rinsed so the loosened dirt washes off instead of drying back in. Most pressure cleaning services price flat work by area rather than by the hour.
Degreaser goes down before the pressure does
High pressure cleaning on its own will not remove oil. Oil sits inside the pores of the concrete, so blasting it cleans the surface around a stain that is still sitting underneath. What lifts it is a degreaser, put on the dry patch and left to work, then agitated and rinsed. Bad stains want a second application.
Heat helps as well. Hot water breaks down oil and grease much faster than cold, which is why hot water units are common in the trade for workshop floors and dock aprons. With no hot water on site, more dwell time with the degreaser gets to a similar place. It just takes longer.
Be realistic about old oil, which is the hardest of the exterior stains to shift. A drip that soaked into a twenty year old driveway will lighten, sometimes a lot, but it may not vanish. Our team says which stains we expect to remove completely and which ones we do not before we quote, rather than afterwards.
Concrete, aggregate and pavers are three different jobs
Plain broom finished concrete is the forgiving one. It is dense, it takes full pressure, and it comes up clean.
Exposed aggregate needs restraint. The stones are hard but the cement matrix holding them is not, and too much pressure washes that matrix out from between them. Once stones start dropping out there is no fixing it, so we drop the pressure and accept slower going.
Pavers and bluestone have sand in the joints. Blast them at full pressure and the sand comes out, the pavers rock underfoot, and you have a re sanding job on top of the clean.
Timber decking is its own thing. A deck comes up well at low pressure with a timber cleaner and turns into a furred mess under high pressure cleaning, because the soft grain erodes faster than the hard. If your deck runs off the end of the driveway, tell the team so we use the right setting on each.
Why the path gets slippery
That green or black film on the shaded side of the house is algae, moss or lichen, and it is alive. It holds water, which is what makes a path treacherous after rain. Older people and anyone carrying shopping are the ones who find out.
High pressure cleaning knocks the growth off, and if that is all you do it will be back within a season. Lichen in particular has roots into the surface. Growth like that gets treated so what is left in the pores dies, and the clean then holds for a lot longer.
Exterior paths on the south side of the house and anything under a gum are always the worst, and they come back sooner than the sunny sections.
Sealing afterwards
Sealing comes up most times we clean a driveway, so it is worth being straight about it. A sealer offers some protection: it slows oil soaking in, makes the next clean easier, and on exposed aggregate it brings the colour back up. It also has to go onto concrete that is clean and properly dry, so sealing is a separate job on a separate day.
Sealing is not part of our cleaning services. It is work for a concreter or a coatings applicator, so book the driveway cleaning first and the sealing after.
Frequently asked questions
How much pressure does it take to clean a driveway?
More than a hardware store unit puts out, and less than people assume on anything other than plain concrete. High pressure cleaning is not really about the number on the machine. It is the nozzle you use, the distance off the surface and how long you hold it in one spot, which is how most people damage their own concrete.
What is the best pressure washer for a driveway in Australia?
Any petrol machine with a decent flow rate, paired with one of the round surface cleaners. Flow matters more than pressure on flat work, because water volume is what carries the dirt away. High flow beats high pressure here.
Is it charged by the hour?
Most driveway cleaning services quote the job rather than an hourly rate, once they know the area, the material and the state of it. Ask whether the quote is fixed or an estimate that can move, and ask what happens if a stain does not come out.
What else gets done at the same time?
Driveway cleaning, the paths, the porch and the pool deck usually get booked together as one set of services. Bundling those services into one visit costs less than two separate trips, and the exterior of the house can be washed the same day if it needs it.
Do I need to be home?
Not usually. Our team needs a tap we can use, somewhere to park and the cars off the driveway. If there is no tap at the front, please say so when you book.
Getting a price for yours
For a driveway pressure cleaning quote, please send the length and width in metres, tell us what it is made from, and upload photos of any oil, moss or discolouration you want gone. Please mention the paths, the deck and the exterior walls at the same time so all the services go on one quote.
Quotes are free and given before any work starts, often straight off photos. Call 03 8682 8767 or contact us for a pressure cleaning quote, and read what the exterior cleaning services our team offers involve under high pressure cleaning Melbourne homes rely on. Walls get house washing rather than pressure, and blocked gutter cleaning is worth sorting first so the driveway does not get streaked again.