Should I Pressure Wash My Tile Roof?
In most cases, your roof is the most valuable part of your home. Utilizing safe cleaning techniques will help preserve your roof and avoid costly repairs. When you pressure clean your roof, you cause irreversible damage.
Lets start by talking about your concrete roof tile. Concrete is essentially sand, high pressure will remove this “sand” from the surface of your roof tile, causing the tile to erode and become faded and more porous. As a result, your roof will take longer to dry when it rains, which means the more you pressure clean your roof the more often you will have to clean it.
The amount of damage done also depends on what type of pressure cleaning you use. Surface cleaners (you know that round disc that has a brush on the edge) have a bar in the middle of them with two pressure washing tips on the end. These tips are angled which causes the bar to spin. It makes pressure cleaning much faster, but this bar can hit and crack protruding roof tiles. A single cleaning with a surface cleaner can leave you with dozens of broken roof tiles. Surface cleaners also leave mildew on the front edge of the tile and would require either chemical or a gun or wand to be effective.
Another method is to use a pressure cleaning gun or wand. This is by far the worst way to clean a roof. It takes much longer than using a surface cleaner and causes significantly more erosion of the surface. Also, when cleaning the edges of the tile the force can lift and loosen the tiles.
You wouldn’t clean you car with a brillo pad or a wire brush. That would ruin your paint, right? Well, pressure cleaning your roof is just a silly and causes the same amount of damage. So now you know, protect your investment and avoid pressure cleaning.