Our Favorite Pressure Washer

The back patio at our house takes a beating. Six kids track mud across it, bikes get parked in the grass, and by the end of a wet spring the concrete had gone from gray to a sort of greenish-brown that no amount of the garden hose could touch. Dad spent one Saturday on his knees with a scrub brush and a bucket and got maybe four square feet done before he gave up and called it a two-summer job.

That was the winter we finally looked into a real pressure washer, and the one we landed on was the Westinghouse ePX3500. It plugs into a regular outlet, which mattered because none of us wanted to babysit a gas engine, and it had enough pressure to strip that green film off in one slow pass. Dad did the whole patio in an afternoon, then got a little carried away and did the siding, the trash cans, and the kids’ muddiest sneakers lined up on the driveway.

We looked at a couple of gas models and a cheaper electric one before this, but the Westinghouse won on the boring stuff that actually counts in a big family. It stores in the garage without stinking of fuel, it starts every time with a button instead of a pull cord, and at $169 it didn’t feel like a splurge we’d regret. A year in, it still builds full pressure and the hose hasn’t cracked, which is more than we can say for most things that live through six kids and a New England winter.