The Sun Joe SPX4000 is equipped with easy glide wheels and a big handle in order for you to easily move it wherever you want to work. Pull the wand’s trigger to release pressure from the system and drain remaining water from the hose. Some user reviews claimed certain units didn’t always seem to live up to their advertised stats so we Champion Power Equipment wanted to test for ourselves. This brand was the only to offer a slick-looking reel for the high-pressure hose. Unfortunately, this feature is nearly impossible to use without getting stuck. The design of the reel exerts extra pressure by bending the hose, and once the hose gets in a bit of a tangle the reel is basically useless.
Especially if you accidentally throw on that red tip- you could cut a hole right through your work boots. Unless you’re stripping paint or cleaning a lot of dirty concrete, you don’t want over 2000psi and 1.7GPM in a pressure washer. The CAT 1800 comes with an all-metal spray gun and a really tough rubber hose that is still very flexible and easy to loop around.
As for features, the Ryobi gas washer shares a lot of characteristics with its electric counterpart. It has the same easy-to-use Velcro strap for hose storage, the same giant wheels, and the same metal roll-bar handle . The overall look and feel is nearly identical between the two models, and the design is as successful on the gas washer as it is on the electric version. With the larger washer models, doing such things is far more difficult.
Two simple hooks, as on the RY142300, make it easy to gently loop the cord and hose, a contrast to the hard-to-deal-with hose reels common to inexpensive models. This hook design, unlike a reel, helps keep the hose from curling too much, so it’s more likely to lie flat in use. This is a common weak point on most pressure washers, and although the Ryobi washer’s holder isn’t anything special, DeWalt’s holder on this model hardly works at all. Any time we had to move the washer, we took off the spray wand and just carried it because we got sick of it falling off just about any time we touched the washer. But what’s worse about the detergent tank is that it’s bolted to the washer body, so if you have detergent left over at the end of a project, you can’t easily put it back in the bottle. The instructions say that at the end of each use of detergent you should fill the tank with water and flush the system.
This way you don’t have to bend down and select a different tip, you can swap tips with just one hand while standing straight up. I don’t want to spend half an hour searching for a penny-sized spray tip in my backyard. But I trust Stanley’s tip storage system to be sturdy and reliable. ► Read press release from Westinghouse of their first electric pressure washers. The ePX3000 comes with 4 quick-attach spray tips ranging from 0° up to 25°.