Driveway cleaning
Concrete, exposed aggregate and pavers back to an even colour, without the stripes.
Phones on Mon–Sat. After that, send a text and we call back before 9am.
- How long
- Most driveways take 1–2 hours.
- Where
- Broadbeach based, Gold Coast wide
- Also
- Paths and steps, Tennis courts, Rust spot treatment.
- Price
- Free, no-obligation on-site quote. We do not publish figures.
- Fibro
- We do not pressure-clean asbestos cement. If we find it, we stop and tell you in writing.
- Arrival
- Arrival window confirmed the evening before.
How it gets done
The same order, every job. If we depart from it, you hear on the day.
- Walk it with you — oil, rust, sealer, drainage and any fibro, agreed before we start.
- Sweep up, then soak the beds and lawn edges on the run-off line with clean water.
- Apply the solution and let it dwell — chemistry kills the algae, not pressure.
- Surface-clean the open slab in overlapping passes at the pressure it can take.
- Detail edges, expansion joints, cut-outs, the strip against the house and the crossover by hand.
- Spot-treat rust and oil with the products that work on them.
- Rinse it all down — plants, path, kerb — and sweep up what the water carried out.
- Walk it with you again before we pack up.
What comes with every job
Not a premium package. It is what a job is, at no extra charge.
- A walk around first
- We go over the property with you before a hose comes off the ute. You hear the bad news at the start.
- Before photos, every job
- Shot before we touch anything, including whatever was already cracked, lifting or perished. That record is as much for you as for us.
- Plants, drains, furniture
- Garden beds wet down and rinsed. Drains and pits covered. Furniture, mats and the barbecue moved out of the way and put back.
- Biodegradable products
- Diluted, left to work, then rinsed. Drains and pits in the wash zone stay covered, and run-off keeps off the inlet where the fall allows.
- The full photo set
- Before, after, and a separate set of anything already damaged. Out with the invoice, sooner if you ask.
- A person you can text
- The number reaches the person who will be standing on your driveway. No call centre, no subcontractor.
None of it is an add-on. No tier unlocks it. Hold any exterior cleaning quote against the list, ours included.
A Gold Coast driveway does not get dirty so much as go biological: nine months of humidity, a storm most summer afternoons and shade off a poinciana is all algae and lichen need to get into the pores of the concrete.
It creeps in from the edges over years, so nobody notices until the house goes on the market — and the damage a wand can do in an hour is permanent.
Why concrete goes black
Most of what you are looking at is alive. Algae and lichen colonise the top few millimetres of concrete, and lichen puts roots down into the surface — so blasting the black off does not deal with it, and it is back within a season. Under the biology sits a second layer of problems: tannin leached out of leaf litter, orange rust bloom where a bore-water sprinkler has thrown iron at the slab for years, red soil trodden in from the garden, and oil off whatever was parked there before. Each is a different fix, and pressure alone only ever solves the first — which is why our first step is chemistry and our second is the machine.
A surface cleaner, not wands
If a driveway has ever come back from a clean looking like a barcode, you have seen what a wand does in open concrete. A wand is a single fan jet on a lance, so how clean a patch gets depends entirely on how fast the operator's arm was moving and how well each pass overlapped the last. Slightly wrong across forty square metres gives you zebra stripes — light bands where the jet dwelled, dark bands where it did not, often with a hard cut line at each sweep. Those stripes are not dirt you can go over again; they are a difference in how much surface has been removed. A surface cleaner solves it mechanically: two nozzles on a bar spinning inside a shroud at a fixed height, so every square centimetre gets the same dwell time. The surface cleaner does the open slab; the wand goes only where it must — edges, expansion joints, the strip against the house, around drains — in deliberate overlapping passes so those areas match the rest.
Aggregate and stencilled concrete
Plain broom-finish concrete is the forgiving one. Exposed aggregate is not: the stones are held by a cement matrix, and too much pressure erodes that matrix and pops stones out. A lost stone does not go back and the patch is there forever, so exposed aggregate gets more dwell and less pressure. Stencilled and stamped concrete is more delicate again — what you are looking at is a coloured surface hardener under an acrylic sealer. On most Gold Coast homes that sealer is fifteen years old, milky or already flaking, and cleaning takes the loose sealer with it and reveals patchy colour underneath. That is not damage we caused, but you should hear it at the quote rather than afterwards. We clean only — no sealing, coating or resurfacing — so if a resealed finish is what you want, we will say so and you can get it done by the trade that does it. Pavers get their own treatment: we work across the joints rather than along them so the jointing sand stays put, and we point out where it needs topping up.
What comes out, what stays
Engine oil that has soaked into a slab for a decade is not coming out with water at any pressure. A degreaser left to dwell and agitated lifts most of it, and a shadow often stays. Rust from bore water, fertiliser or a rusting steel post answers to an oxalic-based treatment rather than pressure, and usually comes out well. Hot tyre marks are the hard one: the tyre transfers plasticiser into the surface, and that can be permanent. Paint spills, battery acid etching and cement wash from an old renovation are the same category — sometimes improved, rarely erased. We would rather sort these into the right buckets with you standing there than discover them together on the day.
Plants, pets and the footpath
The cleaning solution is sodium hypochlorite based — the same active ingredient as pool chlorine and household bleach — at a working dilution, blended so it clings long enough to work. It breaks down quickly, but run-off concentrating at the low point of a garden bed will burn a lawn or a hedge. So the beds, grass edges and any planting on the run-off line get soaked with clean water before we start and rinsed again after: dilution is the protection. Pots and anything precious get moved or covered. Dogs and cats stay inside until the surfaces are dry, and we would rather knock than open a gate nobody told us about. Hoses across a footpath are a trip hazard, so the lines stay tucked and the path clear, and we sweep up what the water pushed to the kerb instead of leaving it for the next storm to carry to the drain.
Fibro, and where we stop
Driveways run past sheds, garages, carports and side fences, and on the Gold Coast anything built before about 1990 may be asbestos cement — flat fibro on a shed wall, corrugated Super Six over a carport, a fence panel already crumbling at the bottom. Using high-pressure water on asbestos cement is prohibited under Queensland's asbestos code of practice, because it drives fibres into the air and into the run-off. We do not test it, guess at it, or decide to be careful with it. We identify it at the quote, keep pressure off it entirely, clean around it, and tell you in writing what we left alone and why.
Questions we get asked
Will pressure cleaning damage my concrete?
Not if the pressure suits the surface. Damage comes from dwell time and distance far more than from the number on the machine — a jet held too close, too long, in one spot. Plain concrete tolerates a lot; exposed aggregate, stencilled concrete and old or spalling slabs do not, so those get lower pressure and more chemistry. If a surface will not survive a clean in the state it is in, we say so at the quote rather than take the job.
The last clean left stripes down my driveway. Can they be fixed?
Usually, yes — but not by pointing the same tool at it again. Zebra striping comes from uneven dwell with a hand-held wand, so the fix is re-cleaning the whole slab evenly with a surface cleaner, bringing the dark bands up to meet the light ones. Where a turbo nozzle has cut grooves into the surface, that is physical damage and it will still show. We can tell the difference on site.
How long will it stay clean?
Twelve to twenty-four months on the Gold Coast, and the variable is shade. A north-facing driveway that dries out by mid-morning holds up for a couple of years; a strip under a poinciana, along a shaded south fence line or under a damp carport starts showing inside a year. Because we kill the growth rather than remove it, what comes back is new spores landing, not what was left behind.
Do you need my water and power?
Water, yes — one standard garden tap is plenty, and we bring the hose. Power, no; the machines run on petrol. If you are on tank water only, tell us at the quote so we can plan around it rather than emptying your tank on a hot week.
Can you do the footpath, kerb and crossover at the same time?
Almost always, and we usually suggest it. The footpath and crossover are what everyone actually sees from the street, and once the gear is set up they add far less time than a separate visit later.
Can you give me a price over the phone?
We do not guess sight-unseen, because two driveways of the same size can be completely different jobs — one a five-year-old broom-finish slab, the other failing stencilled concrete with an oil patch and a rust bloom. Guessing low then adjusting on the day is how people get stung. We come out, look properly, and give you a fixed price on the spot. The visit is free and there is no obligation.
Not sure it needs doing?
Ring and describe it. We will tell you straight.
Ask for a quote
We look at the job and price it on the spot. It costs nothing.
After hours the form still reaches us. We call back before 9am.
Suburbs we cover
Driveway cleaning across the Gold Coast. These are the ones written up so far.
Related services
Two or three surfaces on one visit costs less than separate trips.
Pool surrounds and patios
Travertine, pavers and tiled alfresco — the black line at the coping and the sunscreen film, gone.
House washing
Soft washing for render, Colorbond, weatherboard and brick — mould off, paint on.
Fences and retaining walls
Colorbond, palings, render and block — cleaned at a pressure that does not leave timber furry.