Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Saving our water resorces

Well this is the second entry an I will be surprised to see if it is working without too many problems. I thought I would start with the basic idea of why we wash with water and touch on the major ideas. We'll by talking about gallons of water per minute which we'll start calling gpm this is one of the important factors in water pressure washing. The second is pressure per square inch we'll call psi and we'll get into this more later The other factors with pressure washers will be horse power and heat.
In most major cities the psi (pounds per square inch) is 30 to 40 this means there is @30 psi pressure on all sides of the pipe or hose in your home at all times. When you open the tap this constant pressure supplied by a pump or falling water (a water tower which water is pumped up into) pushes out the water and in most area it will flow at around 4 to 5 gpm (gallon per minute). There are several ways to increase this pressure on your end one is to restrict the water. Nozzling is the simplest, by putting your thumb over part of the hose or pipe you can get it to flow out further or spread out the water.  Your hose probable has an attachment on it to make it squirt or fan out the water the garden nozzle. Forcing water through a smaller hole will increase its pressure vary the holes size and shape and different patterns emerge. You now have a simple form of a "water pressure cleaner". But why does it work? Any thing moving over another object causes friction and heat this is simple science. The water friction is the factor that makes this work water hitting a partial of dirt will add force behind it until it starts to moves. The dirt breaks loose from the surface bond and is washed away in the water stream, the more pressure you can add and direct will cause this to break away faster. During this process the friction causes heat even on the smallest level but think if we can increase this heat what could happen then, another topic. This point is one of the hardest points I have to get across to most of the "green folks" who think power washing is evil and water wasting. I hear all the time but it is using 5 gpm think 5 gpm to them I try to reply yes your right. I try to explain you will use less water with a pressure washer even-though it is rated at 5 gallons a minute, those same 4 to 5 gpm coming out of the tap on your house. Our running time to do the same job is reduced by a factor of over 40% from the garden house method. I can release the trigger and the water stops you'll waste water running back and forth or laying your hose down turning your water nozzle to off I will still use less water doing the same job. In the long run we are saving our water resources  by using pressure / power washers. I'll bring up later in other post how and why we have all different sizes and types of nozzles for our washers and why we use heat but today lets leave it at they speed up our jobs. Speeding up jobs results in more water saved "more conservation". Depending on what we at Cleaned by Pete wash we're able to run the water through chemical or oil socks a device used to capture oil and chemicals after spills. These can be made of several types of materials from treated paper to human hair one of the best materials to attache to petroleum based fluids. Most are a tube shaped with netting or open weave material covering them.

These are the chemicals Cleaned by Pete uses.

90% of free carcinogenics can be captured just using these and they also slow down any larger debris that can be swept up later. Again this is the simplest method of filtering the used water. There are large units that harvest the used water via vacuums and then reclaim it through a filter or series of filters. Some of these units can treat water better than when it out of the source hose and then be reused depending on the system. Now how is that for being "stewards of the earth" we all know that we have one world and most professional pressure washers do and respect our world and do what we can.

PEV series vacuum/reclaim systems
Wrapping up today we can see that water under pressure even in its simplest forms offer quicker and better cleaning. Also that most power washer and the good folks that  run and make a living from them care and do what they can do to help preserve our water resources. I will have more on the next post about water resorces in the next entery where I will plan to talk about cleaners and soap dare I say the dreaded word "chemicals" and how they play into saving both water and gas to power our washers.
Thank you for your support of Cleaned by Pete.


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