Delivery vans spend the working day on the road, then sit overnight in a depot yard, a customer loading bay or a street parking space. By Friday the paintwork carries road film along the lower panels, dust around the wheel arches, and often a streak of dried splash below the doors. A pressure washer removes that film, but it also sends water across the yard, into the door seals, and onto anything standing nearby. That is usually the moment a fleet manager starts asking whether industrial steam cleaning equipment is the better fit. The equipment is not the hard part of the decision. The confirmations listed below are where most projects go wrong.
1. Where the wash actually happens
Steam cleaning is normally chosen for the sites where a wet wash is not allowed, not because it is faster than a pressure washer. Before anything else, describe the washing position for one van in your own depot: is there a drain, a hard standing, a wall within reach, and permission from whoever controls that yard? A shopping-centre loading bay at 06:00, an underground parking level, or a shared industrial estate with no drainage are all situations where low-water cleaning is the practical answer and a pressure washer is simply not an option. If every van has a proper wash bay available, the case for steam has to be made on something else — finish quality, drying time, or the condition of the vehicle after the wash — and that argument should be written down before equipment is requested.
2. Whether the site can supply power and water
A fixed unit in this class is mains-powered equipment. The specification of the Fixed Steam Cleaning Machine PowerDe HW02 records a 220 V working voltage with 6 kW of heating power, an 80 L tank in SUS304, tap-water inflow through a 4-point internal-tooth joint (1/2 inch), a footprint of L1200 × W800 × H1200 mm including handles, dry and wet steam modes, and an included vacuum cleaner. Run each item against your site as it stands today:
- Confirm the available supply matches the machine's working voltage and heating load, and that the circuit serving that corner of the yard can carry it. If the depot runs three-phase, the distribution and protection arrangement has to be checked with the electrician rather than assumed.
- Confirm a tap within hose reach. The inlet is specified for tap water, so tank filling is a manual operation unless your site is arranged for it.
- Confirm that a unit of roughly 1.2 × 0.8 × 1.2 m can be parked, plugged in and refilled without blocking a route. Fixed machines are placed, not driven to the work.
The HW02 detail page publishes a steam temperature of 160° and a vapour pressure of 0.8 MPa alongside the figures above. Treat those as the manufacturer's published values and have them restated in the quotation for the exact unit being supplied, since a delivered machine's settings are what the operator will actually work with. The page does not state the weight, hose and wand lengths, or accessory list, so ask for those and check them against the yard, not against a catalogue photo.
3. Whether the fleet's coating and trim can take heat
Vans are not one surface type. A body in original paint behaves differently from a panel repainted by a local body shop, and a van carrying a vinyl livery behaves differently from both. Steam is high-temperature, high-pressure, and that is the whole reason for buying it, so the heat is exactly what has to be checked against the weakest surface in the fleet. Before the first van is cleaned, confirm with the operator and with your paint and livery suppliers how the equipment is to be passed over wrapped panels, decals, vinyl advertising, door rubber, window trim and headlight housings, and on which surfaces wet steam should be used instead of dry. The HW02 is built for exactly this choice — the cleaning mode switches between dry steam and wet steam — but the decision about which mode goes where belongs to the fleet, and it should become part of a written method before anyone holds the lance.
4. Who operates it, and how long the setup takes
Steam machines have a warm-up phase and a fixed water capacity, so the first job of the day is not the same as the tenth. Ask the driver who will actually hold the wand to run a trial on one dirty van and record three things: how long the machine takes before it delivers usable steam, how many vans are finished on one tank fill, and how long a full shift of vans takes end to end including refilling. Any cleaning programme for a fleet fails on these operational numbers, never on the specification sheet. A fixed unit suits a depot with a permanent washing position and a rota of trained operators; a fleet that has to follow the vans between depots or clean in rented yards is a different requirement, and PowerDe cleaning equipment also covers mobile units, so the comparison should be made rather than assumed.
5. Safety expectations to confirm with the supplier
The HW02 page lists leakage protection, short-circuit protection, high-temperature protection, high-voltage protection, water-shortage protection and high-voltage explosion protection. Treat that list as the manufacturer's description and verify it against the delivery documents: ask which protection covers what fault, how the operator is told a fault has occurred, and what training is supplied with the machine. Outdoor use in a yard, in the rain, with mains power and operators moving around vehicles is a working-at-height-and-in-wet-conditions risk assessment in its own right, and it is worth completing before the machine arrives.
Before you send the enquiry
Write down the washing position, the power and water available there, the number of vans in the rota and how dirty they get between washes, the coatings on the bodies, and the trial timings from one real cleaning day. Those five items let a supplier recommend the right machine and let you compare quotes on the same basis. Send them with your enquiry at the PowerDe contact page, and the technical questions will be answered against your site rather than against a general brochure.
