What’s it like to discover a massive online audience celebrating the day job you experience tired and alone in the baking sun?

After 20 years of bricklaying in the South Australian sun, redditor u/OldMate81 found his true passion: power washing. Typically his job was done after laying brick for the walls of a house, he explains to MEL, but one day he saw an opening to squeeze some more money out of a contract.

“Once all the trades were done and the house was in its last weeks before handover to the client, a laborer was paid to clean the brickwork and access areas that may have needed a bit of [power washing],” he explains. “So, I purchased a 2,200 PSI petrol-powered pressure washer and got busy.”

He was hooked instantly. “I became addicted to the clean,” he says. “I love the finished result! And [the] client’s face always lit up when the job was done right.”

For nearly a decade, OldMate81 took personal pleasure in power-washing newly constructed houses and construction machinery, even though he considered his enjoyment to be “weird.”

“Everyone at the company hated doing it,” he says. “Sure, it’s dirty, smelly and often hot as hell, but it’s just so damn satisfying! I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to do it.”

A year later, OldMate81 discovered he wasn’t weird for enjoying his work when he stumbled into the subreddit r/PowerWashingPorn. With over 600,000 subscribers, the subreddit is chock full of people enjoying the living hell out of a power clean, and OldMate81’s first video was an immediate hit:

“I uploaded a 60-second gif of me power-washing a machine that came from 10,000 hours of service in filthy mines, and it was COVERED in mine dust and excess grease — inches thick!” he boasts.

“But under the mess was a relatively new machine. It just needed setting free. … My boss watched me film it and called me crazy, but it got over 500,000 views and 50,000 upvotes. It got so much attention that some user sent me a ripoff GoPro so I could film more.”

After his first post, OldMate81 says things “got crazy.”

“Most days I’d post something and it would get 10K karma. It was so much fun. My boss was a groomsman in my wedding before I worked for him, so he was cool with me filming as long as I didn’t disclose where I was actually working. He was just amazed at the amount of people who were watching my videos.”

Since then, OldMate81 says he no longer considers power washing a job. “[It] has moved from a form of employment to a flat-out hobby now,” he says. “I still get paid to wash, but I also moonlight as the #PowerWashingBandit — a name the subreddit gave me — because I have a mobile water supply and I drive around and film myself cleaning random public places at my own cost.”

Having power-washed a few things as a janitor at my high school, I can only wonder what kind of worthless internet points I could’ve gathered from having a smartphone at the time. Luckily for OldMate81, and several other power washers on r/PowerWashingPorn, their hard labor doesn’t go unnoticed.

So what’s it like to discover a massive online audience celebrating the day job you once experienced tired and alone in the baking sun?

‘So Satisfying I Have to Watch It Twice’

Greg Hansen, a 27-year-old in Florida, has done all the power washing for his parents’ handyman business since he graduated college. He discovered the subreddit when it was “a lot smaller,” he tells MEL, but it “was love at first sight.”

He adds, “Since it was something I do professionally, I was excited to contribute content and it actually gave me the idea to start a YouTube channel!”

Unlike OldMate81, Hansen says he actually used to hate power washing. “It was just work,” he says. “But once I discovered the communities on YouTube and Reddit and got better equipment, I was thrilled. It’s always a great feeling to sit down and edit videos for a half hour and come out with a final product that’s so satisfying, I have to watch it twice.”

From Hard Labor to High Art

Editing and uploading videos has injected new-found glory into what was just a job for Hansen, and now he treats power washing as an art form.

His knows his audience derives the most satisfaction “from seeing something go from dirty to clean so quickly and almost effortlessly,” he explains. So when his job leads him to a “driveway that hasn’t been cleaned in 10 years, and it goes from black mold and dirt to completely restoring it to the original condition… there’s nothing better.”

And it isn’t just about going clean to dirty for Hansen either. He takes special pride in this video, he says, because it “I feel like it shows the world that everyone can make a difference and we don’t have to tolerate the hate and discrimination from each other.”

Oldmate81 has his own set of rules for crafting the perfect video and gardening enough upvotes to “reach the front page” of Reddit. “What I look for when cleaning is heavy soiling, bright colors under the filth, and patch small enough to clean in under 60 seconds,” he explains. “Those three things get the most attention. But you cannot miss a single spot. Other than that, I have four rules that I try to follow when filming…

Rule No. 1: Close-up shots? Don’t miss spots.

Rule No. 2: Slow and steady movements.

Rule No. 3: No up-and-down strokes.

Rule No. 4: No footage with drops on the lenses of the camera.

It’s not an exact science, but it’s worked for me.”

Power Washing Is Like a Great Soccer Game

Above all else, Oldmate81 says, people just love seeing problems get fixed. He compares his power-washing videos to the buildup of an exciting play in soccer. “The washer misses a small speck and you cannot stop looking at it!” he says. “The anticipation builds as the video moves toward the end of the buffering line at the bottom of the screen. Stress builds, like a soccer fan waiting for the team to score: Come on! Come on! Do it! Don’t miss it! Can’t you see it!… Then, when that last spec is hit, they relax: Ahh, what a ride! Everything is right in the world now.”

Power Washing Is a Lifestyle

But at the end of the day, Oldmate81 says his work isn’t solely reliant on video views. He finds power washing to be a reliable stress reliever. “When I have a stressful day, or I have a day off of work, I enjoy relaxing while pressure-washing anything and everything around my house,” he says. “I honestly never pack [the power washer] up. It drives my wife crazy, but she is so patient!”

That said, he knows he might as well film the wash while he’s at it. “If I’ve got a minute to myself, I’ll get my GoPro and start filming,” he says. Because like the rest of us consumed by the internet, life revolves around the content.