Cleaning & Household
Buy and sell cleaning and household appliances in Panama.
These are the machines for the jobs a mop never finishes: a pressure washer for the dark film that spreads over a patio after a few wet months, a steam cleaner for tile grout, a drum vacuum for the water a leak leaves on the floor. New and pre-owned units both turn up, from a family’s first Kärcher to the spare machine of a crew that washes sofas and driveways for a living. In the parts of Panamá Oeste where the mains supply comes and goes, the detail that decides a pressure washer is whether it can draw from a reserve tank instead of a tap.
A pressure washer is not a steam cleaner:
the two get muddled in listings, though each does a different job. A pressure washer works outside, firing cold water hard enough to lift the black growth that settles on patios, garage floors and garden walls, and the small cordless ones are what air-conditioning technicians carry to rinse split coils. A steam cleaner heats water in a little boiler and works indoors on grout, cooktops and shower screens without detergent, which makes it a different tool from the garment steamer under irons and steamers. A wet-and-dry vacuum is a drum on wheels that swallows sawdust, broken glass or a flooded floor, and a spot cleaner sprays water into a sofa, mattress or car seat and pulls it straight back out with the dirt. Uprights, cordless sticks and robots for the daily dust sit under vacuum cleaners.
A pressure washer for a house on a reserve tank:
work out where the water will come from before you compare pressure. Across much of Panamá Oeste and in Colón the mains supply does not run all day, many households keep a reserve tank, and the washer may have to feed from a drum rather than a hose. Most budget electric models are not self-priming: asked to lift water out of a bucket, they starve and run dry. Kärcher sells a suction hose for its home range made for exactly this, and a seller should know whether one comes with the machine. After that, ignore the headline psi on the box, which is a peak, and look at the flow, because flow decides how quickly a patio comes clean. Growth set into rough concrete shifts far faster under a rotating turbo nozzle than under the flat fan tip.
The sealed pump in a home pressure washer:
a home electric washer costs around $70 to $200 new, and at that price a secondhand one with tired seals saves you very little. Its axial pump is sealed at the factory and cannot be rebuilt, so when the seals go, the pump or the whole machine gets replaced. A professional unit with a triplex plunger pump, the kind car washes and cleaning crews run, starts above $1,000, and its seals and valves can be renewed again and again, so a used one with a service record keeps far more of its value.
Testing a secondhand pressure washer or steam cleaner:
ask to see it running in front of you. A healthy washer holds a steady jet. Pulsing, or a motor that keeps restarting while the trigger is closed, means water is slipping past worn seals or a valve that no longer shuts. Look under the pump for drips, and ask whether it was ever left running on a tank that emptied, because a short spell dry is enough to ruin the seals. On a steam cleaner, time how long it takes to build steam, check that the safety cap seals, and look for white crust in the nozzle, the mark of years without descaling. On a drum vacuum the float cage has to move freely, since it is what keeps water out of the motor, and the filter should smell clean: a cartridge put away wet turns mouldy. A spot cleaner must both spray and suck. If it does only one, the pump or the hose has failed.
Photos and history for a pressure washer listing:
show the hose at full length, the lance and every nozzle, and add a short clip of the jet or a full head of steam. Say plainly whether it washed one patio at weekends or worked for a business, and on a triplex unit, when the pump was last resealed. If it can feed from a tank, put that in the title. A crew owner coming in from Santiago for a professional machine will want to watch it pull water out of a drum in your yard before agreeing a price.