Guide · House Washing
"Pressure washing" has become shorthand for all exterior cleaning — but pointing high pressure at your siding is often the worst thing you can do to it. Here's the difference between soft washing and pressure washing, why it matters, and which surfaces need which.
A pressure washer cleans by brute force — a narrow jet of water hitting the surface hard enough to physically blast material off. Soft washing flips that: it cleans with purpose-made detergents applied at low pressure, not much stronger than a garden hose. The detergent does the work, dwelling on the surface long enough to dissolve grime and kill organic growth, and then a gentle rinse carries everything away.
That green haze on shaded siding is a living organism — algae — rooted into the texture of the surface, with mildew usually keeping it company anywhere that stays damp. Blasting it with water removes the visible layer but leaves the organism alive underneath. It regrows fast, which is why pressure-washed siding often looks tired again within a season.
Soft-wash detergents kill the growth at the root. Nothing regrows until new spores recolonise from scratch, which takes far longer — that's why soft-wash results outlast pressure-wash results on every organic stain. (Roofs have their own version of this story, with higher stakes — that's a separate guide.)
Around here, this might be the benefit people notice most. Lake-country siding collects spider webs, egg sacs, and those stubborn black droppings — and brushing or hosing them mostly smears everything around. Soft-wash detergents break webs and droppings down chemically and rinse them away, over the whole exterior at once: siding, soffits, under the eaves, around the light fixtures where webs love to anchor.
The house doesn't just look clean afterwards — the corners are actually clear, which is the part you feel every time you walk up to your own front door.
Hard mineral surfaces love pressure. Concrete driveways, pavers, stone walkways, and patio slabs handle it well and need it — embedded dirt and algae in concrete's pores won't rinse out at low pressure. The professional tool here is a surface cleaner: a spinning bar under a hood that cleans evenly, edge to edge, with none of the zebra striping a wand leaves behind.
One boundary worth knowing: everything in this article is about organic grime. Rust, oil, oxidized siding, efflorescence, and soot are chemical problems that neither method fixes on its own — those get their own guide.
Almost certainly both, applied to different surfaces. A typical whole-exterior clean at our shop looks like: soft wash for siding, soffits, eaves, and any roof growth; surface-cleaner pressure washing for the driveway and walkways; and pure-water cleaning for the glass. One visit, three methods, each matched to its surface.
With proper technique, yes — we pre-soak gardens and rinse throughout the job so detergents never sit on plantings.
You can — plenty of homeowners handle a light exterior wash themselves, and the principle isn't mysterious: a growth-killing detergent, time to dwell, a gentle rinse. The two things to respect are the chemistry and the plants. Too weak a mix does nothing; too strong can damage surfaces or scorch a garden bed. If you give it a go, work in the shade so the solution never dries on the surface, soak and rinse any plantings below the wall before and after, and know that most off-the-shelf "house wash" hose attachments are too dilute to actually kill growth, which is why those results fade fast. Ground-floor siding is a fair weekend job. When it's up high, over gardens, or you'd simply rather not deal with the chemicals, that's what we're here for.
Most Simcoe County homes look their best on an every-year-or-two cycle — annually for shaded or waterfront homes, where growth and grime build fastest.