How are your outdoor areas looking this month? All the rain we’ve been having lately has turned our lawn into a quagmire and the moss and weeds on our driveway have been loving all the dampness. Me, less so.
I’m normally quite fond of our herringbone block paved drive when it’s all clean and dry, but recently it has been looking very sad. So I was super keen for us to try out a Kärcher Pressure Washer, the K4 Compact Home model, on an unexpectedly sunny day recently.
The Karcher Pressure Washer K4 Compact unit has everything you could need to tackle those outdoor cleaning jobs. It comes complete with lots of great design features, such as storage for accessories, a transport handle, wheels, quick coupling elements, spray lance, trigger hose, T-Racer surface cleaner and a bottle of stone detergent to really get grimy areas clean.
We set the kit up in a matter of minutes and were all set to go.
We wanted to try the stone detergent as the drive was not only mossy and weed-ridden, but dirty too. Lots of soil had blown into the paving cracks evidently, since there was all this weed growth. So we popped the small detergent suction hose into the bottle and turned the spray lance to the ‘mix’ position, which sucked up the soap and sprayed it over the path. We left it on the surface for a few minutes to work, then washed it off with the high pressure jet.
Using the lance gave an impressive performance. The thing that wowed me, as well as the paving bricks visibly brightening under the jet of water, was that it was powerful enough to literally flirt the weeds out of the gaps. Our old jet washer definitely didn’t do that, we still had to pull up the weeds or scrape them out from between the bricks – a job I utterly loathed. So the satisfaction at seeing them fly out of the seams was brilliant!
The efficiency of this machine demonstrated itself in the time it took to complete the driveway and I think the results speak for themselves – here’s a picture showing half the drive cleaned and the other half waiting to be done…
It has gone from looking like an old worn out driveway to a nearly new one! Not bad, considering it is about twelve years old. Even the cat appreciated the difference – she wouldn’t have rolled around in delight on the driveway earlier in the day, I can assure you.
At the back of the house we tackled our decking, which was only installed in the summer, but needed a clean, so we used the circular T-Racer Surface attachment that comes with this kit and is ideal for patios and large outdoor surfaces. It can tackle stone, concrete and wood – even vertical surfaces like garage doors. With an ergonomic handle and twin-jet rotation arm that ensures dirt removal, when compared to cleaning with a spray lance, the cleaning time is reduced by about half.
The fact that this particular Kärcher unit is not too cumbersome is a real plus. Often the thought of tackling heavy jobs is enough to put me off, but I know this unit can be easily stored in the shed and wheeled down the path and coupled up to the tap at the side of our house in no time – all of which means I’m more likely to clean the driveway regularly and keep it looking good.
And here’s a few clips of the Kärcher Pressure Washer K4 Compact Home hard at work:
As a brand ambassador, the Kärcher K4 Compact Home was provided for free, but the review is 100% honest and my own opinion
