How to Use Your Pressure Washer with the Kitchen Tap

How to Use Your Pressure Washer with the Kitchen Tap

Purchasing your first pressure washer can be incredibly exciting – all of a sudden you have the ability to deep clean your property in a thorough and efficient way, it opens up all sorts of new cleaning opportunities! 

However, pressure washers aren’t much use without a water source – after all, they literally blast water at dirt and grime at high-pressure levels, thus rapidly using a lot of water.

If you are lucky enough to have a tap in your garden, you will have access to water for your pressure washer whether you are deep cleaning your patio or giving your garden furniture a quick rinse.

Not everyone is as lucky as this, and this is why I’ve put together the following guide on how to use your pressure washer with the kitchen tap.

Everyone has a kitchen tap, it’s a guaranteed water point and this means that no one is restricted when pressure washing.

If you’ve ever wondered how you might deal with this situation, read on because you’re about to find out!

What You Will Need

Attaching your pressure washer to the kitchen tap may sound easy, but it’s actually kind of confusing. Kitchen taps generally do not have any threads, and this means that it often feels impossible to attach a hose to one.

Every time you turn on the water, the pipe will stay for a second or two before being blasted off by the water pressure, it’s ever so frustrating. 

Don’t worry though, because there is a solution. However, in order to pull it off, you are going to need to have the following items:

• A threaded tap adapter suitable for your pressure washer
• A hosepipe of suitable length
• A freeflow tap connect to connect the hosepipe to your pressure washer
• A trigger gun

How to Use your Kitchen  Tap as a Water Source

Setting this system up is pretty simple, but the attachments that I just listed are absolutely essential!

Without a threaded tap adapter, there is no way that you will manage to successfully attach a hosepipe to your kitchen tap when the water pressure is on full. 

Similarly, attaching the other end of the hosepipe to your pressure washer simply isn’t going to work without the correct attachment.

You should never try to force it, as this could potentially cause damage to your hosepipe or worse, the pressure washer! 

You will need to begin by attaching a round tap adapter produced by your pressure washer manufacturer, and use this to join the kitchen tap to a hose pipe.

The hosepipe needs to be sufficiently long (we’d recommend 5 to 10 meters at a minimum) so that you can manoeuvre the pressure washer liberally without worrying about pulling the hose off of the kitchen tap. 

Attach the other end of the hosepipe to your pressure washer via a freeflow tap connector, and attach the trigger attachment.

Turn your tap on to maximum, wait a moment for the water to fill, and spray the trigger – you should now have a constant flow of water to use whenever you want!

Safety First

Before you get excited and start busting out your attachments in anticipation of a kitchen tap-powered power wash session, there’s a couple of quick things that we want to mention first.

These points all come down to safety, and whilst this may be a bit boring, it is 100% necessary. 

We cannot emphasize enough the importance of a sufficiently long hose pipe. This isn’t just about convenience – it’s about safety around the kitchen.

Imagine if you normally used a 10m long hose but only had a 5m hose for this particular job, it would only be natural that you might overstep the pressure washer range and accidentally remove the hose pipe from the sink. 

This would be pretty disastrous, especially if the kitchen sink’s plug was being used. If you quickly remove a hose pipe from a water solution, the water is going to spray everywhere.

This could be relatively harmless such as soaking clothes, but could also be much more damaging such as if it landed on expensive electronic goods!

You should also conduct a thorough risk assessment of the area before you start. Did you consider that the mains-powered toaster is placed right next to the water tap?

All it would take is an accident knock, and you could be in a dangerous electric situation that would be far worse than any water spillage. 

Alternative Solutions 

Whilst more or less every household has either an accessible kitchen tap or a garden tap, this isn’t always the case. In this event, don’t give up hope – you’ll simply have to get creative!  

One great idea is to use a bucket of water, fill it up with either rainwater or water from another tap in your house.

You can then attach a suction attachment to the hose of your pressure washer and suck the water from the bucket straight into your device ready to be used!

Whilst this is a pretty solid solution to the problem, it must be said that it can get laborious for high-pressure tasks that require a lot of water, you’ll be filling that bucket up constantly so it’s a two-man job really.  

One final alternative would be to use a portable pressure washer that uses a detachable tank. This is similar to the previous solution but without the requirement of the suction attachment.

You can simply fill up the detachable water tank of your pressure washer and get to work immediately.

However, there are two main problems with this – portable pressure washers aren’t usually very powerful, and their tanks are also pretty small.  

Conclusion 

Overall, whilst setting up your pressure washer to work through the kitchen tap may initially be a bit of a faff, it is absolutely possible as long as you own the right attachments.

You will also need to ensure that your kitchen tap is accessible and that you are not going to cause a trip hazard, and a general risk assessment should be undergone. 

Other than that, make the most out of that kitchen tap of yours! It’s not just for filling up the kettle, it can also be a valuable part of your pressure washing arsenal. So, what are you waiting for? Get your attachments out and give it a blast!