On 27 Jun 2005 11:11:07 -0700, wrote:

I'm planning to paint the exetrior of my house to get it ready for
sale. The old paint is in decent shape, with not much peeling, so the
main function of the pressure washing will be to clean the surface, not
strip the old paint. In fact, I'll mainly be repainting the faded trim
and only touching up the walls.

I was going to do the same thing, but then I heard from a couple of
different sources that pressure-washing as paint prep was a really bad
idea. First one was on a rerun of This Old House a couple of months
ago, and the second was the salesman at the Sherwin Williams store.
Evidently, it can wreck the paint from the inside, even if you let it
dry for a couple of weeks. Previously, I had always scraped and
sanded, and after hearing a couple of folks warning against
pressure-washing, I figure I'll stick with the old tried-and-true
method. Could be a load of BS, but I figure they know more about it
than me and I'd hate to waste a couple hundred bucks worth of paint.

And really, if you're just mainly doing trim, it's not all that hard
to sand it down, even if you're taking it down to bare wood.

I was planning to rent a 2,400 psi washer from Home Depot, but am also
considering buying a low-end consumer washer for $70-100. For example,
there's one on sale at Sears with 1,500 psi (not sure about the GPM
rating).

Would something like this be sufficient for my needs, or should I rent
the heavy duty one?

If you're main concern is washing it, consider how deeply you really
need that water to penetrate the wood... seems like the smaller one
would work just fine to me.