North Star pressure washer surface cleaner brush attachment, $2.

Few people pause to consider the business end of pressure washing. Professional-grade, heavy duty pressure washing equipment is expensive, and that goes for the associated parts, pieces and attachments too! But so much this stuff looks so foreign to us that we have no idea what we're even looking at when we see it!

If you've ever tried using a pressure washer to clean off large, flat surfaces like the exterior walls of a house, patio slabs or driveways, you know how agonizingly slow the process can be. Unlike most items normally cleaned with a pressure washer, these surfaces often require a close up, concentrated blast of water to get the surface clean. The trick here is to hold the wand a few inches from the surface and move the wand back and forth, which although quite effective, leaves a swath of clean only about three inches wide. As great as pressure washers are, they can take forever to clean large areas, and that's where this handy attachment comes in.

This surface cleaner attachment is connected to the end of a pressure washer, and allows for a much larger area to be covered in a given amount of time. When the high-pressure hose from the washer is attached to this unit, the water is channeled down to a T-shaped arm underneath, which has a water nozzle on either end. Notice how the nozzles at the ends of the arm don't point straight down, but are angled off to the side, causing the arm to rotate rapidly as the high pressure water shoots out. As the arms spin around, the rotating jets are able to clean an area a full 12" wide, really cutting down the time it takes to clean a patio, wall or driveway.

As you can imagine, it's relatively unlikely that a homeowner who cleans off his driveway once or twice a year will bother to get one of these attachments, but what about the guy who has a pressure washing business? Do you think the allure of being able to clean off a dozen driveways per day instead of one or two would be enough to sell him on this device? You bet it will.

It's likely I wouldn't have maid my $2 for this attachment if it was used, because there's the chance it may be damaged or broken. And although nothing is an absolute certainty in this business, new stuff is always a safer bet than used stuff. These small North Star attachments sell for about $75 or so brand new, and this attachment sold on eBay for $46. No crazy profit, but a nice snack that paid for the day's gas.

Note that although this little attachment was financially nothing more than a snack, it's a very important addition to your mental database. The larger surface cleaner attachments, like the 16", 20", and 27" models, cost around $200, $280 and a whopping $600 respectively, making them really worth keeping an eye out for!

Make no mistake about it - equipment that's intended to make money costs money, and the pressure washing business is no exception. Take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the professional end of this business, because you never know when what you learn here today will come in handy!

This North Star pressure washer brush attachment sold on eBay for $46.