Last Thursday after the Miata Club meeting we went over to John & Carol’s house to borrow their pressure washer for my weekend deck cleaning. John gave me a brief run down on their well used unit, he showed me how to twist the wand to go from pressure to light spray and told me that I could expect some leakage around the hose inlet. He had used some teflon tape around the threads, but there was the split o-ring on the quick disconnect part that sort of negated any progress made with the tape.
We already had a half day off from work on Friday, so we put in for a 1/2 day of vacation to have the whole day off. We did some running around in the morning and it wasn’t until after lunch before the cleaning began. I had purchased a bottle of deck wash with chlorine in it that was supposed to mixed with 5 gallons of water, but seeing as my deck was FILTHY, I poured it into about half that amount of water. I placed the suction tube in the bucket and started washing. The pressure was doing a good job separating dirt from wood, but I wasn’t getting any soap. Being a pressure washing virgin and John didn’t tell me that part, it wasn’t until I had an epiphany did I turn the nozzle to spray and get soapy stuff. Sprayed soapy stuff on about half the deck and let it soak in while I went back to blasting gray and mildew off the boards in one inch wide strips. I was making unsteady progress.
There are two parts to the quick disconnect thing, the male part on the hose inlet and the female part that screws on the hose and snaps on the male part. The male part was on the washer already and John rummaged through a box until he found a female part that would snap on . I’m not so sure these matched exactly because the quick disconnect was prone to random disconnections while in use. Because it was not good to have the pressure washer running when there was no water coming in I would shut it off every time the the hose popped off. The only trouble with that was the on/off switch was not real reliable, so the best thing to do was unplug it. So, every time the quick disconnect would spontaneously let go, a wild hose would snake around on the deck while I hustled the 25 feet back to where the washer was plugged in the wall. Then I would have to exit the screen porch and walk by where the hose was shooting water out and down the stairs and the 25 feet to where the spigot was to shut off the water. Walk back to where the pressure washer was, hook up the disconnect, walk back to the spigot turn the water back on, walk back & then past the washer into the screened porch to plug the plug back in and then back over to the washer to start spraying again.
Not only did this spectacle happen randomly, but it could also be caused by me struggling to get the wand to swap from sudsy spray to power spray. There was a detent that you had to get around by simultaneously pushing down and twisting and whenever I did this it seemed I would tug just enough on the wand’s hose to move the washer which caused the disconnect to let go, spraying water, etc, etc.
After about half dozen disconnects I thought I could shortcut the reconnection process by not making the long walk back and forth to the faucet. I thought I could use that old fold-the-hose-in-half trick. Big mistake. You can’t really get it totally squeezed off and that little pressure wouldn’t allow me to get the quick disconnect on and locked, so it popped back off causing the split o-ring to come off too. Naturally the surprise of this caused me to let go of the hose and the now gushing water stream pushed that little o-ring right between a deck board down into no man’s land. #$%&@!
I have some of those same types of disconnects on my hose reels. I couldn’t use the back as that was the one I was using to “wash” the deck, but the one in front was ripe for pilfering. I snagged the o-ring off the front male fitting and pushed it on the one on the pressure washer. This worked great, the massive leaking due to the old split o-ring stopped, but with one exception, wait for it, the new o-ring must have been just a touch smaller because now the frequency of disconnects increased.
After about 3 hours, Donna came out to check on me and as she watched me from the safety of behind the bedroom door she was treated to the sight of me struggling to rotate the wand to soap spray and in my struggle I accidentally disconnected the wand from the handle. My grip was on the wand, so the handle crashed to the deck causing a twist and tug on the hose which of course made the hose come loose from the pressure washer and snake around on the deck soaking me more than I already was. I must have given her just the right look because she opened the door and asked, “Would you like your own new pressure washer.”
Sixty-nine dollars later – The Weekender
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 143