Driveway cleaning: DIY hire versus a pro
A hire lance and a weekend get you zebra stripes and a pitted surface. A pro runs a flat surface cleaner for one even pass, pre-treats the oil, and finishes in a fraction of the time. Schmick driveway cleaning starts at $180, and most driveways land between $180 and $420 — often near what the hire alone costs, minus the lost Saturday.
The zebra stripe is baked into the hire lance
A pressure washer from the hire shop comes with a narrow lance — a single high-pressure jet, sometimes a rotary turbo nozzle. You wave it across the concrete by hand. Wherever the jet dwells a fraction longer, it cuts deeper. Wherever you move faster, it barely touches. The result is the striping you see on half the driveways in the street: clean lines against grey, a corduroy pattern that no amount of re-doing fully hides once it is there.
Get too close, or lean on a turbo nozzle, and it stops being a stripe problem. Concrete is not uniform. The jet chews out the soft cement paste and leaves the harder aggregate standing, so the surface goes rough and porous. Pitted concrete holds dirt faster than it did before, which means the next clean comes sooner. You have traded one Saturday for a surface that will disappoint you at a shorter and shorter interval.
The flat surface cleaner erases the stripe
A professional does not clean a driveway with a bare lance. The tool is a flat surface cleaner — a shrouded disc with two or more jets spinning on a bar at a fixed height above the slab. Because the jets are held at a constant distance and sweep in a circle, every square centimetre gets the same dose of pressure. You overlap the passes and the whole driveway comes up one even tone. No dwell marks, no hand-waving, no stripes to explain away afterwards.
It is faster and gentler at once. The spinning bar covers a wide path per pass, so a driveway that would take hours with a lance is done in a fraction of the time, and the contained water pattern keeps overspray off the render and the neighbour's car. Pressure is matched to the surface — firmer on concrete, backed right off on pavers and sandstone, where a raw lance would blow the jointing sand out or scar the stone.
Oil and rust don't move for water alone
The stains that bother people most — the black engine-oil halo under the car, tyre scuff, rust runs from a steel gate — are not surface dirt. Blasting them harder just pits the concrete around them while the stain sits there, because oil has soaked into the pores. Water pressure alone cannot lift what has chemically bonded below the surface. This is where the hire-shop route quietly fails: more pressure, more damage, the same stain staring back at you.
A pro pre-treats first. A degreaser is worked into the oil and given time to break the bond before the surface cleaner passes over it, and metal stains get the right treatment rather than brute force. Be clear-eyed, though — deep, years-old oil that has migrated all the way through the slab may never come fully clean, and an honest cleaner tells you that before starting, not after. Cleaning lifts what sits in the pores; it does not reverse permanent staining.
The hire ticket is the smallest number on the day
Add up the DIY route honestly. A day's washer hire, the fuel to fetch it and return it, a surface-cleaner attachment if the shop even stocks one, and the better part of a Saturday bent over the concrete. Then the risk: strip a stripe pattern into the slab, or pit the surface, and there is no undo. You have spent money and a day to arrive somewhere worse than a flat, even clean — and you own the mistake.
Against that, Schmick driveway and path pressure cleaning starts at $180, and most driveways land between $180 and $420 by area, with sealing available as a set add-on. That is a firm, bookable price covering the flat surface cleaner, the oil pre-treatment and the labour — often within reach of what the hire alone costs you, minus the lost Saturday and the risk of striping your own driveway.
The number takes about a minute to get
The honest comparison isn't DIY versus some vague figure you have to chase down. It is DIY versus a price you can see right now. Schmick's instant quote asks for the driveway size and returns a firm, bookable number in about sixty seconds — no inspection visit, no callback, and it holds unless the place turns out to be materially different from what you described. You compare it against a day's hire before you commit to anything.
If you are already booking a house wash or the gutters, say so — bundling services on one visit trims 5 to 15 percent, and one crew does the lot in a morning. Either way, put your driveway's size into the quote and set that number beside a day's hire and a bent back. Then decide whether the stripes are worth owning yourself.