Questions on soap injectors for pressure washers

MadReferee · Jul 12, 2005

For those interested here is a link to the Suttner injector from Northern Tool. It's the unit on the bottom in th picture.

Suttner upstream soap injector

seapea · Jul 13, 2005

Oops. Just got the chance to finally look at my pressure washer again. I had it backwards. The original chemical injector is the downstream one and only works when the wand is in low flow mode. The one I got to replace it is upstream like the Suttner. This is what I have. Note the picture shown is for model 22686, which does not have the metering nob on the chemical inlet. Like I said, I'm not overly happy with it. It's hard to get the chemical flow just right. I wonder if the Suttner would work better.

MadReferee · Jul 13, 2005

Remember, on the upstream units the siphoning action depends on the pressure differential between the garden hose pressue and the pump. If you have erratic or very low water pressure that could cause you to have siphoning problems and if your valve is not adjusted right the problem could be magnified.

Erratic pressure can be caused by a well pump that is cycling often or by a faulty or misadjusted well pressure switch. These injector valves have no moving parts so there is not much that can go wrong with them except for misadjustment and clogging.

_RaT_ · Jul 13, 2005

<font color="blue"> Worked perfectly. I had to power wash my 40' x 15' deck and ran the power washer for about 20 minutes straight using the high pressure soap setting and used about 9 gallons of injected liquid. The liquid solution was warm water, mild laundry soap and some bleach.
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I have tried the commercial deck cleaners that require you to soak the wood and found that they work so much better then the soap and bleach I used to use. For redwood decks it is especially true. The chemical needs time to do its stuff. It is applied via a hand sprayer. It also helps to have as high of a GPM pressure washer as possible.

I will NEVER go back to the old fashioned method with high pressure injection again. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif