Fence Cleaning in Fort Worth

Fence cleaning is a chemistry job with a rinse behind it, not a pressure washing job. We pre-wet the fence line and everything growing along it, then apply a low-strength sodium hypochlorite mix, roughly one to two percent at the surface, mixed with a surfactant so it foams up and clings to a vertical board instead of running straight to the ground. That kills the algae and mildew and lifts the gray.

It dwells five to ten minutes. We keep it wet the whole time. Letting bleach dry on cedar is what leaves blotches.

The rinse runs around 500 to 800 psi with a wide tip held a foot off the boards and moved with the grain. Cedar and treated pine are soft, and the light spring growth in each ring erodes faster than the dark summer growth. A 2,000 psi rinse leaves permanent furrows and a furred surface that grabs dirt and grays out again faster than it did before.

Then the brightener. Hypochlorite leaves wood alkaline and uneven, so we follow with an oxalic acid pass that drops the pH back down, pulls the black iron stains out from around the nail heads and screws, and returns cedar to a honey tone instead of a washed-out beige.

Vinyl gets different chemistry entirely. Chlorine does nothing to chalking or to white hard-water scale. An oxidized vinyl fence gets a detergent pass to carry off the loose chalk, and the mineral banding on the lower rails gets an acidic cleaner, rinsed at low pressure so water isn't driven into the hollow rails at the seams. Be straight about what that buys you: washing takes the chalk off your hand, but it doesn't reverse the oxidation underneath. Deep chalking needs an oxidation remover, and on a badly weathered panel some of the dull stays dull. We'll tell you which one you have before we start.

The bottom boards are where the money goes. Sprinkler overspray keeps the lowest foot of a Fort Worth fence wet most of the summer, and cedar sitting against wet clay soil rots from the ground up, so these fences almost always fail at the bottom rail and the picket ends while the top three feet still look fine. Our expansive clay makes it worse. The same soil that heaves and drops posts holds water right against the wood.

A gray fence isn't only a look, either. Once UV has broken down the lignin holding the surface fibers together, what's left is loose cellulose that holds water instead of shedding it, and in our humidity that means mildew comes back deeper every season.

Stain and sealer won't bond to that layer. That's why a fresh stain over a dirty gray fence flakes off in patches inside a year and you pay to strip it twice. Cleaning and brightening is what makes a stain job stick. We clean and brighten, and we don't stain or seal, so what we hand back is bare wood that's ready for whoever does.