All these cheap pressure washers are same on the inside, the motor/pump whatever is made in china, with the buyer custom plastic housing/branding.
This is the secret, to make these things last. Bookmark this boys.
Never turn ON pump and wait for the water, because it has to suck the water, it spins dry for we seconds, causing massive wear and tear, the water itself acts as a sort of coolant/lubricat for these machine, so make sure you never run it dry, if you water supply stops in the midst, kill the motor immediately. You will hear the pump noise changing when it is getting starved of the water.
What to do instead is hookup everything turn on the water tap but not the pump, squeeze the gun trigger wait for the water to come out of the gun naturally, when you see all the air is out, the water flow is constant, then you turn ON the pump and unleash the beast.
Do not use the water from the bucket, they advertise it as a feature, it's okay to use in emergency, if you have access to tap water just use that. Pulling water from the bucket puts more stress on the motor, because it has to pull and pump it out, wheareas if you use the tap water with a good enough flow, your pump doesn't have to worry about it, when the basic pressure of tap water is more than what the pump requires, the pump is happy to amplify it.
Once you are done with washing, normally people unhook everything or the just leave it as it is. This is bad, you don't want to leave the water inside the pump. Because of the hard water when it dries out inside the it leaves deposits behind which are bad for the seals and stuff inside. So after you are done, turn off the water tap, squeeze the gun trigger, now turn on the Pump >> intermittantely << in small pulses, via the switch manually, basically we don't want to run the pump at full speed, just enough to get all the water out of the pump, once you see no water is coming out of the gun, it's done for storage.
Hard water is the enemy, if you have very hard water, it contains many other stuff, the machine life will decrease, nothing can be done regarding this, it's on your luck.
Never run the pump continously for longer periods of time, think of it like if you used it for 1 min, wait 2 minutes to dissipate the heat. If you used for 5 minutes straight wait 10 minutes for it to cool down. Just maintain something close to this ratio, doesn't have to be exact, so you have some sense of control over the heat generation, of course don't run it for straight 15 minutes or more, it will cause thermal runaway. Usually this never happens when washing the car.
The pumps have oil in them, which needs to be replaced, this is hard to do if you are not mechanically inclined. It takes same gear oil that our car gearbox takes, you can ask the seller what grade of oil these things take. Ideally the oil change interval depends upon how much the pump is used, we have no way to know for how much time the pump actually ran in a year, we don't have odometer like thing in these like our cars. So people don't change oil in these and these things go bad, but they also don't follow the above practices, the pump goes bad even faster.
So if you can change the oil, do it, it will increase the life of it somewhat, don't expect that it will keep on working with regular oil change interval, no these are not meant for that kind of reliablity. If you can't change the oil, which is the case of most people, no need to worry, think of it as use and throw because these are cheap, consider what the machine does.
The bar pressure specification on these are false advertising, the actually cosntant pressure is lower, the value they advertise is the peak pressure that happens only for some milliseconds when the pump starts, so that value is of no use for us. All most all of them have good pressure none the less, it's lower than the advertised but still powerful enough.
Buy the one with the highest wattage, or which is bigger in size, not the plastic housing, the size of the actual motor, bigger motor == bigger pump means less stress which means longer life.
This is all you need to know about the puny yet powerful madness.
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