Commercial pressure washing covers the exterior surfaces customers form an opinion about before they reach your door — entryways, walkways, drive-thru lanes and the pad round the back that fails your health inspection. The operational difference from residential work is scheduling: it happens when you are closed.
What we clean commercially
The recurring categories, roughly in order of how often they get requested:
- Entryways and sidewalks — gum, spills, foot-traffic grime and the darkened path people actually walk
- Dumpster pads and enclosures — the surface most likely to be flagged by an inspector, and the one nobody wants to think about
- Drive-thru lanes — concentrated grease, oil drips and tyre marks in a narrow, high-traffic strip
- Storefronts and awnings — soft washed, since signage and awning fabric will not take pressure
- Parking areas and loading docks — oil staining, rubber, general accumulation
- Fleet and equipment — work trucks, trailers and yard equipment, covered in more depth on our fleet page
Scheduling around your hours
Nearly all of this work happens outside trading hours. Restaurants get done after close or before open, retail before doors, offices at weekends. The truck is self-contained, so we do not need access to your water, your building or a member of staff standing around.
For recurring accounts we set a fixed cadence and simply turn up. Monthly suits most food service, quarterly works for retail and office, and pads and drive-thru lanes generally want a tighter interval than everything else.
The practical reason to put it on a schedule rather than calling when it looks bad: grease and traffic film get substantially harder to remove the longer they sit, so reactive cleaning costs more per visit than preventive.
Grease, and why hot water comes up
Heavy grease — the kind that accumulates on a restaurant dumpster pad or in a drive-thru — is genuinely easier to remove with hot water. Heat breaks the bond faster and the job goes quicker.
We work with cold water and degreasers. On grease that means longer dwell times and more passes rather than an inability to do it. The result is comparable; the time is not.
We would rather say that plainly than quote you as though there were no difference. If your site is a heavy-grease environment, factor it into the schedule — a shorter interval keeps the work in the range where cold water and chemistry are entirely sufficient.
Wash water and compliance
Commercial exterior cleaning has a regulatory dimension residential work does not. Many jurisdictions restrict what may enter a storm drain, and wash water carrying grease, detergent or oil is frequently in scope. Restaurant pads and fuelling areas are the usual pressure points.
Requirements vary by municipality and we will not pretend to a blanket answer. What we will do is talk through your site before quoting — where it drains, what is on the surface, and whether containment or reclaim is called for.
If your property manager or franchisor has documented requirements, send them over with the enquiry and we will quote against them.
How commercial work is priced
One-off cleans are quoted per job on square footage, surface condition and access. Recurring contracts are priced per visit at a lower rate, because a maintained surface takes materially less time than a neglected one.
Multi-site operators and property managers should ask about a single quote covering all locations — routing several sites in one trip is where the efficiency is, and that gets reflected in the rate.
Everything comes in writing before we start, including what is and is not in scope.
Go Deeper