How mineral build-up can affect your washer’s coil

Unless you’re using pure, distilled water to clean your transportation fleet, you’re probably running hard water through your Hotsy Water Blast pressure washer. Most water in Canada, including Vancouver and Calgary, is “hard” to some degree. All it means is that there are trace amounts of normally harmless minerals in the public water supply. When you’re taking a shower or brushing your teeth, the hardness of the water doesn’t matter very much. Things are different when it comes to your pressure washer, however.

Without regular maintenance and preventative measures, one way that hard water can damage your pressure washer is through scale build-up. When hard water is heated up, as it is when it passes over the coil in your pressure washer, it can turn into a solid, or “scale.” This solid build-up restricts water flow and eventually leads to corrosion of the metals in your machine. If scale is not dealt with regularly and efficiently, it can greatly reduce the useful life of your pressure washer.

How to keep your washer coil working efficiently

There are three easy ways to keep your pressure washer working properly:

1. Let your pressure washer’s burner fully cool down after use. The hotter your water gets, the more scale is likely to occur in your machine. Properly cooling down the machine as instructed in the manual and flushing the debris from your machine with cold water after use will help reduce deposits. Use water softener. A water softener will remove calcium and magnesium from the water, which helps to reduce scale build up in the heating coil and also requires much less soap and a much better finish. Water softeners are a great to save money on maintenance and chemical costs. Professional Maintenance. Even the most carefully maintained pressure washer will have some amount of scaling if used regularly. That’s
   why, in addition to normal preventative measures, it’s a good idea to have your pressure washer regularly checked by a professional. Cleaning scale and lime build up is not a job you should do at home. Having a maintenance check every so often is, in the long run, cheaper than expensive repairs. Visit our blog, “How well do you maintain your pressure washer,” for a
   maintenance checklist and how to inspect your pressure washers for issues.

At Hosty Water Blast, we do everything we can to make sure that our customers get the most out of their pressure washers, no matter how hard their water is. Contact us at Hotsy Water Blast today to find out more about how to protect your pressure washer from harmful scaling.