Why your driveway looks striped after cleaning — and can it be fixed?
If your driveway came back looking like a barcode, the cause is almost always the same: a handheld wand, waved by hand, at inconsistent height and speed.
Why a wand stripes concrete
A pressure wand concentrates water into a narrow fan. Held closer, it cleans harder. Held further away, it cleans less.
No human hand holds a wand at a consistent height across a whole driveway for three hours. The variation shows as light and dark bands.
Overlap makes it worse. Where passes overlap, the concrete gets cleaned twice and comes up lighter still.
What a surface cleaner does differently
A rotary surface cleaner is a shrouded disc with two or four jets spinning under it. It sits on wheels at a fixed height.
Every square centimetre gets the same pressure from the same distance for the same duration. That is what even coverage means.
It is also two to three times faster, which is part of why a fixed-price operator uses one and an hourly one may not.
Can striping be fixed?
Sometimes. If the stripes are dirt still present in the darker bands, a proper even re-clean with a surface cleaner resolves it.
If the concrete was etched — pressure held too close, actually eroding the surface — that is permanent. The profile of the concrete has changed.
The tell is texture. Run your hand across it. If the light bands feel rougher than the dark ones, it is etched, not dirty.
Etched concrete can be resurfaced or a coating applied, but neither is cheap. This is why the first clean should be the right one.
Need concrete cleaning in Melbourne?
Concrete cleaning in Melbourne. Paths, patios, garage floors and exposed aggregate cleaned evenly with commercial surface cleaners.