Pressure Washing Services In Your Basement For Raw Sewage Cleanup: What You Need To Know

Are you wondering if hiring a cleaning service would be worth the cost? Learn more about the advantages of employing a cleaning service.

Pressure Washing Services In Your Basement For Raw Sewage Cleanup: What You Need To Know

23 March 2019
 Categories: , Blog


When you need to clean up after raw sewage backs into your basement, a pressure washer is a good choice. However, pressure washing services in your basement come with a few issues of which you need to be aware. Knowing what these issues are and how to prepare ahead of time will prevent the potential problems and provide you with a cleaner, healthier basement post-raw sewage backflow. 

Move Everything Six Feet Away From the Floor Drains

If you are like most homeowners, you tend to use your basement for storage. Move everything within six feet of your floor drains way out of range. A pressure washer can cause some minor splattering, and the last thing you want is to spend more time cleaning splatters of water and raw sewage off of anything you have stored near the floor drains. If storage totes or tubs already have some of the sewage on the bottoms, set those in an area by themselves to clean off later and focus on the floor now. 

Cover Everything Else with Disposable Tarps

To prevent everything that you cannot move from becoming wet or damp, cover these areas and things with disposable tarps. Some examples are shelves, the water heater, the furnace, and/or any appliances that you have in the basement that are near the floor drains. When you are done cleaning the floor with the pressure washer, you can ball up the disposable tarps (with gloved hands, of course!) and place the used tarps into a garbage bag for disposal. Now all of those stationary and hard to move objects remain clean after the cleanup process is completed. 

It Takes Time to Force Sewage Contents Back into Floor Drains

Despite the fact that pressure washers can do a lot of cleaning very quickly, it still takes a good amount of time to pressure-push raw sewage back down a drain after the drain has been unblocked/cleared. You will need at least an hour to clean up a mess that is about six feet or more across surrounding your floor drains. When you are done pressure-pushing fecal matter and bits of used toilet paper back into the sewer line, you will need to bleach the floor and pressure wash the bleach on the floor into the drain as well. If you do not want to use bleach, there are antibacterial cleaning solutions you can sometimes put into a pressure washer to apply to the areas you are cleaning. 

For more information, contact a company like Clearview Window Cleaning and Pressure Washing LLC.