There are, I discovered, two ways to clean and seal a wood deck. There is the approach I have taken when tackling the task. That would be cleaning the deck with a garden hose and sealing it with a paint roller. Then there is the mode professionals such as Jim Yeiser and Phil Muth employ. They clean the wood with a power washer, then apply the sealant with a mist emitted by a power spray.
My method costs less, about $75, compared to theirs, which costs about $460 for an average deck. Their results look much better.
"We do get a fair amount of business from guys who said, 'I did my deck once and I am never going to do that again,' " Muth said. He told me this one brilliant morning this week as we watched members of his Pride Services Group crew get ready to seal the deck of a townhouse in Owings Mills. Muth is the owner of the deck-care business and Yeiser is the manager of the 15-year-old enterprise.
Right away, it was apparent to me that the pros approach their deck work with much more patience and preparation than I have demonstrated.
The Pride Services crew had cleaned this deck several days earlier. The workers had used a power washer capable of shooting water out at a pressure of 3,500 pounds per square inch. This is a pressure level only pros use.
The power washer rinsed off the coating of Dr. Dave's Deck Soap, a mixture of lye-based detergents that Muth had named in honor of the former employee who created the potion. Then they let the washed deck dry for two rainless days. The arid period is important, Muth said, because the wood has to be dry to accept the sealant. Before applying sealant, they measure the amount of moisture on the deck with a tool called a moisture meter.
By contrast, when I washed the deck of a beach house last summer, I used a jug of cleaning solution that screwed onto the end of a garden hose. After I finished cleaning the deck, I was itching to seal it and waited only one day for the deck to dry. My moisture meter was my bare big toe, which I rubbed on the surface of the wood.
Some people are wary of having a power washer clean their deck, Yeiser said. They are worried that the high pressure will damage the wood, causing it to look fuzzy.
Pressure washers can damage wood if they are held too close to deck or if the psi - pressure per square inch - is too high. For most woods 1,500 to 2,500 psi should be sufficient.
