Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 8 stucco sprayer broke

In the last blog I detailed an experiment that I was trying with the stucco sprayer.   In this blog I have no progress to really report.   Unfortunately, the stucco sprayer broke.  The reason it broke is that I was futzing around with it trying to get it to work.  There was to much dried residual stucco in the inner workings.  So after playing around with it the spray valve broke.   If I had known that I was supposed to disassemble it to clean it out this would not have happened.  Stucco is harsh material and I can see its hard problem to have a machine with fine parts have to work with it.  Anyway, I called the manufacturer and they are sending me two new valves free of charge.

In the mean time I cleaned out the stucco sprayer.  This is actually the first time I completely disassembled it.  I found harden stucco everywhere.  To get the stucco off I first tried distilled vinegar.  That seemed to work some what but it seemed to run out of cleaning ability so I switched to barnacle buster.   Barnacle buster has phosphoric acid in it.  This got most of the stucco off and some paint too.  I don't think it had an effect on the rubber o-rings,  There is another concrete dissolver known as mean klean which is gycolic acid based that is often used for chemical face peels,  I would have tried it but it is expensive and has to be ordered online in this area.  Here is a before and after picture:

Moral of the story is to clean the stucco out with water when it is wet.

Here is a pic that shows the state the house was left in before the sprayer broke.

There is good news though.   The pavers have arrived and they look great.

See what happens in the next blog.

That's all for now,

Happy building,

The Dr.