Plenty of exterior cleaning is genuinely DIY-able, and a company that tells you otherwise is not being straight with you. The question is which parts.
What the rental actually costs
People compare a $95 rental against a $150 driveway quote and conclude the maths is obvious. It usually is not, once the whole day is counted.
- Machine rental: $70–$110 per day for something with enough output to be useful
- Surface cleaner attachment: $30–$50 — and without it you will produce tiger stripes
- Cleaning solution and surfactant: $25–$60
- Collection, return and deposit hold: a couple of hours plus a vehicle that can carry it
- Your Saturday: 4–8 hours for a driveway and walkway
Realistically $130 to $220 in hard cost plus most of a day, against roughly $150 for the same driveway done properly. The saving is real but it is smaller than it looks, and it disappears entirely the first time something goes wrong.
Genuinely worth doing yourself
- Small patios and walkways. Ground level, hard surface, low stakes.
- Garden furniture, bins, garden tools. Ideal DIY jobs.
- Vinyl fencing you can reach. A soft brush, a bucket of house-wash mix and a garden hose does most of the work.
- A concrete pad behind a shed. Nobody is judging the finish.
- Rinsing salt off at the Beaches. Plain water, garden hose, monthly. Genuinely useful and needs no equipment at all.
Not worth doing yourself
- Anything on a roof. Falls are the real risk here, not the cleaning. A wet roof at any pitch is a serious hazard, and the most common DIY method — pressure — damages the shingles regardless. See roof cleaning.
- Second-storey anything. Ladder work with a pressure hose is how people get hurt. The wand kicks.
- Painted or chalking surfaces. The margin between clean and stripped is narrower than it looks.
- Large driveways. Not because it is hard, but because doing it evenly across 800 square feet with rented equipment is genuinely difficult, and tiger striping is permanent until the whole slab is redone.
- Screen enclosures. One torn panel costs more than the job.
- Paver sealing. The most commonly botched DIY job in this trade, and stripping a failed sealer costs more than having it done right.
The five most expensive DIY mistakes
- Tiger striping a driveway. Fixable, but only by paying someone to clean the whole slab again.
- Stripping granules off a roof. Not fixable. Shortens the roof life measurably.
- Forcing water behind siding. Often not discovered for months, by which point it is a moisture problem inside a wall.
- Fuzzing a wood deck or fence. Needs sanding, and the wood removed is gone.
- Falling. The one that actually matters.
The part most DIY attempts miss entirely
Even done carefully, a rented pressure washer and plain water only removes the visible layer. It does not kill the algae. The colony regrows from the roots within weeks, which is why so many people conclude their house "just gets dirty fast".
If you are doing it yourself, that is the single most useful thing to change: use a proper house-wash solution with a surfactant and give it dwell time, then rinse gently. That approach with a garden hose will outperform a pressure washer with plain water, and it is far safer for the surface. See how the three methods differ.