Pressure cleaning in Penrith, with the price written down first

At the 2021 Census, 78.3 per cent of occupied private dwellings in the Penrith local government area were separate houses. Across New South Wales the figure was 65.6 per cent. Flats and apartments were 9.1 per cent of dwellings here, against 21.7 per cent for the state.

That one number decides most of what a pressure cleaning job in Penrith is. The work is house walls, eaves, downpipes, gutters, tile and metal roofs, driveways, paths and back patios, almost all of it at ground level or one storey up. It is not the lift lobby, podium and basement car park mix that a job carries in a suburb where one dwelling in five is an apartment.

It also means the second storey surcharge is the exception in Penrith rather than the rule, and that a single driveway and a house wash on one visit is the ordinary shape of a job here.

Penrith City Council names the Nepean River and Wianamatta South Creek, together with their tributaries, as the waterways inside the Penrith local government area. Council also runs works on Jerrys Creek at Wallacia and on the banks of Peach Tree Creek.

Council states the position plainly on its stormwater page. Stormwater runs off roofs, driveways, gutters and roads into the stormwater system. Unlike sewage it is not treated before it reaches the creeks and rivers. On the way it picks up nutrients, dirt, chemicals and litter. Council names bank erosion from hard surface runoff as a further consequence, and gives the Peach Tree Creek stabilisation works as its own example of the repair.

In the newer parts of the area, Jordan Springs among them, council says riparian corridors and creeks have to be maintained and enhanced, and that concrete stormwater channels are no longer allowed. The receiving water for a wash in those streets is an open, planted creek line, not a covered pipe.

So a driveway in Penrith sits upstream of a named creek that gets no treatment. Council enforces the pollution rules for most incidents in the area, and the state Environment Protection Authority takes the major ones. Our answer is the same on every Penrith job. The wash water is contained and recovered. It does not go to the kerb, and it does not go down a stormwater pit.

The Bureau of Meteorology station at Penrith Lakes gives a climate that is not the coastal Sydney one. Relative humidity at 9am averages 74 per cent across the year and reaches 85 per cent in June. By 3pm the yearly average has fallen to 48 per cent. At Sydney Observatory Hill the same two annual figures are 69 and 57 per cent, a much flatter day.

Mean annual rainfall at Penrith Lakes is 756.3 millimetres. At Observatory Hill it is 1211.1 millimetres. July nights at Penrith Lakes average a minimum of 5.4 degrees, against 8.1 degrees on the harbour.

Two things follow for a Penrith house. Cold nights and damp mornings put dew on every surface, and the elevations that get no sun hold it for hours. That is the south wall, the shaded flank of a tile roof, the path beside the fence and anything under a tree, and it is the run of hours that lichen, moss and black mould need. The north wall bakes dry by lunch and stays clean far longer, which is why one side of a Penrith house often looks a decade older than the other.

The rainfall gap does the rest. With well under the rain that falls on the coast, road film, brake dust and airborne grit are not rinsed off a Penrith driveway anywhere near as often. They sit, bind and darken, and by the time the surface looks dirty the staining is already in the top of the concrete.

Asbestos NSW estimates that one house in three built or renovated in New South Wales between 1945 and 1990 contains asbestos. The two products it names first are corrugated roofing and cement sheeting. Both are house products, on houses, at the exact surfaces a pressure cleaner is asked to wash.

That matters more in Penrith than the state average suggests, because Penrith is a detached house area. With 78.3 per cent of dwellings here separate houses, the roofs, eaves, garage walls and side sheeting that carry the risk are the ordinary furniture of a Penrith quote rather than something you meet occasionally.

So the cement sheet question is asked on every Penrith job before anything else. If a wall, an eave, a garage or a roof is cement sheet, or we think it might be, we stop and tell you, and we do not wash it at any pressure. We do not have the build year for every street in the area and we do not guess at it, so we look at the sheet in front of us.