Best accessories and attachments for your pressure washer
Peter Sitkowski | 6th May 2023 | 5 minutes to read
With your pressure washer by your side, you’ve managed to knock off a bunch of bothersome cleaning jobs you’d been intending to take care of for years, but there are still places you’re struggling to reach and surfaces that aren’t coming up pristine.
Luckily, there are a ton of pressure washer accessories you can pick up from your nearest Repco store that’ll help you handle specialised jobs and supercharge your cleaning process.
We’ve compiled a list of some of the most useful accessories available for pressure washing so you won’t have any excuses for leaving the gutters full or the deck covered in moss:
Foam Jets and Cannons
Most pressure washers will come with a dispenser for soap that will allow you to add cleaning solutions directly to your water stream, but sometimes you need extra suds for a more comprehensive clean.
Foam nozzles can help to make a job like cleaning your car more effective by turning your soaps and detergents into a sudsy foam that will cling to the surface for longer and help to cut through grease and caked on mud.
Foam cannons and nozzles will have containers for detergent that feeds directly into the nozzle, with some allowing you to directly attach branded detergent bottles and switch them in and out quickly.
Gutter and Pipe Cleaners
Cleaning gutters can be a difficult process even with a pressure washer. Luckily, there are a number of different solutions to dirty gutters from various pressure washer manufacturers. There are hooked telescopic lances that you can use to clean your gutters from ground level, as well as sleds with built-in jets that can be pulled through your gutters to clean them.
You should be careful though, as using high PSI settings to pressure wash your gutters can cause damage to the pipes, so you always want to use a lower setting when rinsing your gutters out.
Removing blockages from pipes with a pressure washer is another job that is made vastly more efficient with specific attachments. Some are simply longer, heavy-duty hoses that you can attach to get extra reach down drainpipes, while something like the Karcher pipe cleaner comes with four rear-facing jets that will help to dislodge large blockages with directed pressurised water.
Different Pressure Washer Nozzles and Lances
Nozzles are the bread and butter of pressure washing. Different tasks require different amounts of pressure and so having a selection of nozzles is important.
Usually, your pressure washer will come with a selection of different nozzles that will offer various PSI levels, such as a 0°, 15°, 25°, 40°, and a 65° nozzle. The lower the number, the tighter the spray pattern and the higher the pressure.
You can also buy these nozzles as separate kits if you don’t have them and pick up 6-in-1 nozzles that will let you shift between different levels of pressure without having to manually switch out the nozzle each time.
There are turbo nozzles that will give you even more power than the 0° attachment thanks to a circular spray pattern, extension lances for extra reach, powerful dirt-blasting nozzles, and hinged telescopic lances for rooftop cleaning —although we’d recommend a more delicate soft washing solution for your roof.
Brush Attachments
Sometimes a stain or patch of algae is just too stubborn even for a pressure or power washer. In these instances, you’ll just have to get it done the old-fashioned way and start scrubbing. That doesn’t mean you have to get down on your hands and knees though, because most pressure washers will allow you to attach scrubbing brushes onto your lance to allow for a fuller clean without breaking your back.
Drying Systems
One of the minor drawbacks of pressure washing is the sheer amount of water that can be left over when you’re done with a job. This is usually not an issue if the surface is concrete or wood and it can be left to air dry in the sun, but if you’re washing your engine block and want to ensure that water doesn’t seep into areas it shouldn’t, drying that water off can be incredibly important.
A leaf blower will certainly get the job done in a pinch, but it’s a cumbersome piece of equipment for the task and lacks the control of dedicated dryers. Something like the Bigboi Drying System Buddi Jnr will pump out 200km/h filtered warm air and has noise filtering, so you won’t blow out your eardrums while blow-drying your car, making it a much better solution to water droplets and streaks.
Surface Cleaners
If you’re looking to clean outside areas and decking but don’t want to deal with the splashback produced by power cleaning with a pressure washer, a surface cleaner is a fantastic option. These attachments allow you to efficiently wash your deck or concrete surface, as they contain jets of pressurised water within a solid housing that stops water from escaping and combine that with a soft-bristle skirt that helps to scrub surfaces clean.
Surface cleaners can help to give you a more uniform clean as well, with attachments like the Karcher T7 Plus T-Racer Surface Cleaner using two jets on a rotating arm that help to move the high-pressure water around and remove dirt and grime more easily. The twin nozzles also create a hovercraft effect that makes the surface cleaner easy to move around and allows for a uniform clean.
You can even use surface cleaning attachments for vertical cleaning because they’re on the end of a practical handle, which makes them more versatile than dedicated surface cleaners.
Specialise Your High-Pressure Cleaning
Once you have a full toolkit of pressure washing accessories by your side, you’ll be able to tackle even the toughest cleaning problems. Repco also stocks replacement guns and hoses for pressure washers and various shampoos and cleaners that you can purchase online or at your nearest Repco store.
