Out of all the investments you make, your home is probably the biggest. Like any investment, you need to protect it and take care of it. After all, you wouldn’t buy diamond earrings and leave them lying around your home or invest in the stock market without doing a little research first.
Your home is the same way. If you don’t take care of your investment, then it’s going to lose some of it’s value. Sure, you can mow your lawn, keep your living room tidy and clean out your gutters once in a while, but like any room in your home, you’re going to have to clean the outside of your home to keep it in good condition.
That’s where soft washing comes in. Similar to power washing, soft washing helps get rid of harmful dirt, debris and pests that may be living and growing on the sides of your home. Soft washing in Houston cleans your home without inflicting unnecessary damage onto it.
As the weather changes once more, it may be time to schedule a soft washing service in your home. In Houston, a soft washing can protect your home for the coming season and ensure it stays protected all winter long. Here’s how soft washing protects your home.
What is soft washing?
You’re probably heard the term soft washing, but never really known what it means or how it works.
Soft washing protects your home and property from organisms that grow on it and may harm it. This includes moss, mold, mildew and algae, but it also includes pests like spiders and other insects. All of this is done without damaging your most important investment — your home.
Soft washing uses a gentle spray that has a chemical solution mixes into it. This solution is environmentally friendly, so you don’t have to worry about your family and pets, but it’s strong enough to clean the sides of your home and other surfaces such as your driveway, deck, patio and fence.
How soft washing protects your home from the elements
Everyday, your home takes a beating from the elements. It stands up to torrential rains, thunderstorms and even the occasional snow shower. It keeps the heat at bay in the summer and insulates you in the winter. All this to say: Your home takes quite a beating.
Think of your home like the shower in your bathroom. It’s exposed to extreme conditions everyday. It can be dry when everyone is out of the house at work or school, but in the mornings and evenings, the hot water can make everything damp, and the heat and steam from the shower raises the temperature of the room. In the grand scheme of things, all of this is fine, but ask yourself: What would happen if you never cleaned your shower?
You can probably guess what would most likely happen. Dirt would begin to build up on the floors and around the rim up the tub, and you would probably see streaks of mildew. Mold will start to grow in small crevices around your shower and likely on your shower curtain. In time, your bathroom would be almost toxic, and you’d never be able to really clean yourself inside. And let’s face it: You would never want to set foot in that bathroom because it would look pretty gross.
Your house is like your bathroom, only much bigger. It too is exposed to extreme temperatures that allow moss and mold to grow, and it has many crevices and damp, dark spaces where pests love to hide. While you don’t need to clean your home as often as you do your bathroom — after all, many of these organisms are good for your home in small doses — you still need to clean it once in a while to make sure that your home never experiences too much of a good thing.
Soft washing and pressure washing services
Some homeowners confuse soft washing and pressure washing services, and it’s easy to see why. Both services involve some pressure, but their purposes differ.
You’re probably most familiar with pressure washing services. When you hire an expert in pressure washing services, he or she will use varying degrees of water pressure, depending on the surface you want to clean. For example, your concrete driveway can take a beating, but the oil stains and cracks that have weeds and pests living in them can do damage overtime. With pressure washing services, you can blast away dirt and debris, revealing a clean driveway underneath.
Your house, however, isn’t quite as sturdy as your driveway, at least not in some places. Windows will break if the water pressure it too strong, and you could even crack the siding around your home if it’s too much. If you have an older wooden deck in your backyard, high pressures might break it and cause serious damage.
Pressure washing works best for heartier surfaces, but for windows, siding and older decks, soft washing will do the job just fine. The chemical spray within the soft wash does the work of pressure washing services without the risk of doing serious damage to your home and property. The chemicals are strong enough to break down mold and deter pests from making their homes in the crevices of your siding.
Best of all, the chemicals are environmentally friendly, which means they won’t hurt the plants around your home, and they won’t hurt your family or pets either. Together, soft washing and pressure washing services give you the best of both worlds.
What happens if you neglect soft washing
As experts in pressure washing services and soft washing, we know that no two homes are exactly alike, and it’s not easy to know exactly what will happen if you neglect soft washing your home. Much of it depends on the materials used to build your home as well as the layout of your property. Is it in direct sunlight all the time? Does it have a lot of trees that tower over it? Is it near the coast or on a lake?
Even if your home has no trees around it or bodies of water anywhere near it, you still need to soft wash your home at least once a year. If you don’t, you may be inviting a number of unwanted things to grow and live on your home.
For most homes, mold is the biggest worry. Not only does it make your home look dirty and dingy when it grows and covers the siding, but it can also be a health hazard is too much of it grows. Mold always seems to find a way to get inside, so if you have even the slightest of weakness in your siding, you can bet mold will find a way inside.
Once mold gets inside, that’s when the problems really start. You’ve probably heard of black mold, but you might not know how dangerous it can be or how easy it can be to miss. You might have seen photos of homes practically taken over by black mold, but black mold isn’t always out in the open. Sometimes, it can live in the walls or under your sinks where you won’t notice it.
In most humans, black mold causes respiratory issues because you’re breaking in the spores that black mold releases. You may find yourself coughing and sneezing more around your house, and your eyes may become dry and itchy. You may get a rash, and you may feel like you have a constant headache.
But those are just the short-term effects of black mold. Overtime, black mold symptoms include vomiting, nausea and bleeding in the nose and lungs.
The best way to protect your home against black mold is to stop it from getting into your home at all. Soft washing will wash away black mold on the outside of your home and prevent it from getting inside. Now black mold can still find other ways to get inside your home, but if you secure the outside, that decreases the chances of that happening.
Mold can also rot away wood around your home if it’s left alone for too long. If you have a wooden deck, the mold can cause the wood to start rotting. If left alone, that can make being on your deck downright dangerous. The rot can damage the foundation of your deck, making it dangerous to stand on. That will be a very costly replacement, so it’s best to soft wash it at least once a year to prevent that build up.
Why you should hire soft washing service experts
Some people really do love to do everything around their homes themselves. They love cutting their own grass, painting their rooms and making repairs both inside and outside their homes. That may be fine for minor work, but when it comes to soft washing in Houston, it’s time to hire an expert. Experts in soft washing and pressure washing services have seen just about everything in and around Houston. They’ve dealt with new homes and older homes, big homes and small homes, cracked driveways and smooth ones. They know how to spot signs of house decay or trouble when carrying out pressure washing services, and they can help homeowners understand how to take better care of their properties.
Experts in pressure washing services have all the right equipment and training to make sure the job gets done right. They know how to use the right pressure to clean your home without damaging it, and they can switch between different pressures depending on how intense the cleaning needs to be. Experts in pressure washing services aren’t looking to get in and get out quickly. They’ll take their time and make sure the pressure isn’t too high or low.
In fact, it’s the pressure that often gets homeowners into trouble. When they do it themselves, some homeowners try to use as much pressure as possible. They think that more pressure will clean things faster, giving them more time to get back to the hobbies they’d usually be enjoying. But when using too much pressure, homeowners run the risk of accidentally breaking a window or cracking the siding of the home. These can be costly mistakes, and you will be paying for them out of pocket. If an expert in pressure washing services damages your home, their insurance will pay for the damages, but in reality, an expert knows how much pressure is too much and will likely avoid doing damage to the home at all. That’s really the biggest benefit to hiring an expert in soft washing and pressure washing services.
Best of all, when you hire an expert in soft washing and pressure washing services, you get that time and energy back. If you’re like most people who work hard every week, then you deserve to relax on your weekend. You don’t want to spend it doing more chores around your home. You want to spend it hanging out with your family and relaxing by the pool or in front of the TV. With all that time and money spent renting a pressure washer and doing it all yourself, it would be just as cost effective to hire an expert in soft washing and pressure washing services to do the job for you. At least with an expert, you know you’ll have the job done right the first time.
At Advantage Pro Services, we treat every home like it was our own. We want to help our customers keep their homes in tip-top shape, and we’re here to help any homeowner in Houston who struggles with mold on siding or oil stains on the driveway. Our experts in pressure washing services in Houston are reliable and knowledgeable. They want to see every customer happy and satisfied with their services.
So tell us: How will soft washing protect your home in Houston? Share with us in the comments and reach out if you have any questions about pressure washing and how it can protect your home from the elements.
