Soft washing — low pressure plus a cleaning solution that does the actual work — is the right method for screens, enclosure frames, and painted surfaces. Pressure washing tears mesh, blows spline out of its channel, and is the kind of damage screen warranties commonly exclude. Save the high-pressure wand for one surface out there: the concrete deck under the cage.
That’s the South Florida version of it. If you’d rather not run this schedule yourself through a Miami summer, tell us about the place and we’ll send a price for keeping it on one.
Two different machines, and only one of them cleans
The two sound like settings on the same trailer, and they are not. A pressure washer works with force: water at high velocity through a narrow tip, knocking material off whatever it hits. A soft wash works with chemistry: a dilute cleaning solution applied at roughly garden-hose pressure, left to dwell a few minutes, then rinsed. The pressure in a soft wash exists only to carry the solution up to the panel and to take it back off.
That difference matters more on a screen than almost anywhere else, because what is on your mesh is alive. Green on a lanai screen is growth, not soil — it has taken hold inside the weave, on the shaded side, where the mesh stays damp. Force strips off the visible layer and leaves the living part seated in the fibers, which is why a blasted panel looks clean in October and is green again by Christmas. The solution kills it. That is the whole argument for soft washing, and it has nothing to do with being gentle for its own sake. The homeowner-scale version of the same chemistry is in how to clean green algae off lanai screens.
What a pressure washer actually does to a cage
A screen panel is a thin membrane stretched drum-tight and held in an aluminum channel by a rubber spline. Nothing in that assembly is built to take a concentrated jet head-on. Four things give way, roughly in this order:
- The mesh. A tear starts small and never stays small: once the weave opens, the panel is a repair, not a cleaning job. Older mesh goes first — Florida sun degrades the coating season after season, so the panel that shrugged off a wash five years ago is brittle now.
- The spline. Run a jet along the frame line and it lifts the rubber spline out of its channel. The panel goes slack, then bows, then pops out. This is the failure nobody sees coming, because the mesh itself never tore.
- The frame finish. The paint and powder coat on the aluminum, and the vinyl kickplate along the bottom, are what keep salt off the metal. Strip or chip them and you have started the corrosion you were washing to prevent.
- Screws, caulk and the roof panels. Concentrated water finds every fastener and every bead of caulk on the structure and drives water where the assembly assumed rain would simply run off. Up on the dome, that also means someone on a ladder holding a wand that kicks.
Then there is the paperwork. Screen manufacturers’ and installers’ care instructions commonly exclude damage caused by pressure washing, and a voided enclosure warranty is not something you discover until the day you try to use it. Before anyone points a wand at your cage, read your own installer’s care sheet — a five-minute check that decides who pays for a torn panel.
The one surface out there that wants high pressure
The concrete deck. Pavers, a pool deck, the driveway — flat, hard, and cheap to resurface if you mark it — genuinely take a pressure washer, and the same company usually quotes them alongside the cage in one visit. That is the entire list. The cage, the screen door, the kickplate, the painted posts and the aluminum frame are soft-wash work.
Order matters more than people expect: cage first, deck second. Everything that comes off the mesh and the dome rains down onto the deck, so a deck cleaned first gets dirty twice. Ask how landscaping is handled, too — beds and hedges around a pool deck get pre-wet and rinsed afterward, not merely avoided — and across much of south Miami-Dade, ask what the association says about runoff into the pool-deck drains before the crew arrives, because that answer sometimes decides the date.
“A pressure washer removes what you can see. A soft wash kills what put it there. Only one of the two buys you a clean panel next season.”
The money makes it an easy call
The price guides Florida enclosure-washing companies publish put a full cage wash between $200 and $600 — we take that range apart, lever by lever, in what pool cage and lanai cleaning costs in Miami. Wherever your number lands inside that band, it is a maintenance cost you were going to pay on a rhythm anyway: the same guides land on a full wash every 12 to 18 months, tightening to 9 to 12 near salt water, which is the calendar most of coastal Miami is on.
Now price the other outcome. A blown panel does not get fixed by the company that washed it: rescreening is a third trade, quoted per panel, with its own call-out. We do not publish a rescreening figure and will not invent one, but two things about it are certain without a number — it is a second contractor on top of the wash you still owe, and it goes on their calendar, not yours. That is the asymmetry. You would be risking a repair bill and a second wait in order to save nothing at all, because soft washing is not the expensive method. It is the same visit, done with a solution instead of a jet.
If you are doing it yourself, the arithmetic is even more lopsided: a pump sprayer, a soft brush and a morning cost less than the machine rental you were going to drive home — and that machine is the one thing out there that can turn a Saturday into a rescreening bill.
Where a house-cleaning crew fits — and where it doesn’t
Straight answer, because this post has spent five sections recommending a trade we are not in: a full pool-cage soft wash is exterior-cleaning work with dedicated equipment — tanks, an injector, extension poles, ladders for the dome — and JAS does not sell it. A house-cleaning crew hand-cleans what a person can reach and sensibly wipe: the lanai surfaces, the furniture, the slider, the screen door, and spot work on reachable screens. That is a different scope, and calling it a cage wash would be a lie.
What does carry a published price on our side is the room the cage encloses. A deep clean in Miami is published at “Starting at $349” — a “4–6 hour visit · 2-person team”, “42 items verified by photo” — and it is built for what a lanai room collects: baseboards, air vent covers, sills, door and frame edges, the slider on that side of the house. Our outdoor add-ons are “Patio or balcony cleaning” and “Sliding-door track cleaning”, selected and priced separately, and the windows add-on covers reachable interior panes and frames. The mesh is in none of the three. The buying order is the one our Terms publish: “We price before you commit: you request a quote, see it, and then request a time”.
One more boundary, in case something worse than algae is hiding behind this search: if what is growing inside the enclosed room is active mold, a cleaning visit is not remediation and we will not describe it as one. Our Terms say we reserve the right to refuse or stop service where conditions are unsafe for our team — such as mold, infestation, biohazards, or abusive behavior.
Quick answers
Can I just turn the pressure down on my pressure washer?
Turning it down helps, but it does not turn the machine into a soft wash. The tip still concentrates whatever force is left into a narrow band, and plain water at any pressure does not kill the growth — that is the solution’s job. If your machine has a soap nozzle and a solution tank you are close: widest tip, well back from the mesh, and let the solution sit before you rinse.
What should I ask a soft-wash contractor before booking?
Four questions: what solution goes on the mesh and at what dilution, whether they pre-wet and rinse the landscaping around the deck, whether they carry insurance with a certificate they can send your HOA, and whether the deck is included or quoted separately. The answers tell you more about the crew than the total does.
Can the deck be pressure washed while the cage is still standing?
Yes, and it usually is — the wand stays angled down and away from the frame. The zone to watch is the low band where spray bounces off the deck back up into the kickplate and the bottom panels, plus the screen door, which catches more incidental spray than anything else out there.