A simple "upgrade" for Parkside PHD 110 E1 Pressure Washer

I am a person who gets bored very easy. I mean, I'd rather spend a day taking the engine off the car or putting in a new sound system, but I don't like cleaning it.

Ok, you can take it to a car wash, but to be honest, I avoid it because I have to let my car in and then wait somewhere nearby, like a coffee shop, to go and pick it up when it's ready.

So I was cleaning it myself, and I decided to get a cheap pressure washer to see if it would work. So I got this one from Lidl at a cost of around €70, which I can say has good pressure, but it didn't do the job I wanted; that means, either you wash it with that or with the garden hose, it had the same effect, i.e., the dust remained on the car as soon as the water dried and was even worse than before it was washed.

So since I still had to wash the car with a sponge or something and rinse it off, why would I have to pull a hose to get the washer when I can do the same job with a simple tap hose? It doesn't make sense.

That's why I only used it twice before letting it collect dust. However, since, as I said, washing is boring, I thought I might as well do something to just use the washing machine and avoid using a sponge.

As a first idea, I wanted to get a kitchen water heater from someone cheap to experiment with, but I changed my mind because I was afraid that the plug wire would not withstand both the water heater and the washing machine and would melt. Ok, I could change it to something to hold on to, but I thought I'd do something simpler that wouldn't need too much of a process to get it working.

So I took a durable plastic container and made two holes in it; in one, I adapted a nozzle where the water intake is, and in the other, another one for the extraction, where I connect the washing machine.

From the lid, I add a small amount of car shampoo and close it so that the water does not overflow. The container must be strong enough to withstand the pressure of the mains water, and the water is entering from the top so that the shampoo is mixed until the container is filled with water. Now there may be some off-the-shelf similar items for sale; I don't know, but when I was looking for the materials in two large tool chains, I didn't see anything that would do the job I wanted.

My first tests were pretty good, as you can see in this part where the hood is shiny and the difference from before is visible. Ok, I took the pictures so I could see the results myself, but since I thought I'd make a post and since I don't have any better ones, I'll show these.

Also here you can see how the shampoo is spread on the car.

The whole process is very simple, just like I wanted it to be. You start by putting shampoo in the container, and you start washing the car so that the shampoo covers all of it. When all the shampoo runs out, the water will start to come out clean, so you have to keep washing it until it is okay.

That is, within a few minutes, and with a little dose of shampoo, I cleaned both the car and my motorcycle to a satisfactory degree. Of course, some dirt that is difficult to clean might have gone away immediately if I had hot water with the shampoo; that's why I wanted the instant heater in the first place, but you can use the sponge for the difficult spots and then wash them off with the pressure washer.

Here I must say that the pressure washer needs some water pressure in order to start, probably to trigger a switch. But if it does not start because it does not have the required pressure, the solution is simple: we just connect the washer directly to the faucet, turn it on, and when it is armed and ready for operation, connect it to the container.

This was my idea to upgrade this pressure washer. I'm not responsible if you try it and your machine breaks from the shampoo. Maybe I'll come back with another post if I finally decide to try something that heats the water or some other idea to improve the machine and, of course, the washing process.