Cleaning some old outdoor tiles

casper_gutman

Agreed, well done you for being willing to get stuck into this! As mentioned above in the Church of England it will be the Church Wardens who'll be responsible for upkeep of the building, so check with them. In other churches there will usually still be people other than the priest/minister who are responsible for the building, but they might have some other title - e.g., trustees or similar.

RHemmings

I'm waiting until I can speak to another person other than the minister. In the meantime, I'll do some more weeding next Sunday. It's my wife who is Christian, not myself. Hence, this gives me more of a role to fulfil. 

twopenny

It's more about what you don't do and what to avoid.
Don't use harsh chemicals 
Don't use wire brushes and the like.
Don't use abrasive pads.

Sweep well with a yard broom before cleaning. Maybe a hands and knees job or if you have a hose with high pressure get as much from between the tiles as possible or that will just spread onto the tiles when you're finished cleaning.

Do you have a patio brush head for the pressure washer? It should be softish and the water stream through rather than blast the surface.

After all you just want any algae gone, not an as new finish 

RHemmings

Thanks for all the help everyone. We spoke to the minister and a vestry member today. However, they wish to do things differently. They definitely want to take advantage of our volunteer labour, but want the groundsperson to handle the bricks, and they say that they will pressure-wash them. We've started weeding the brick pathway out front and completed about 1/3 of it. But, they say that they will use weed-killer on that. What they want us to do is weed out the wild garlic, goosegrass, and nettles in the church grounds. Which there is an awful lot of. 

I offered to finish hand-weeding the bricks (different from the tiles), but I think they want to be strategic with offers of help, and the garden weeding is what they want. 

I feel a bit guilty about starting this thread expecting to wash the tiles and things have wandered off. But, I can see their point. The wild garlic is flowering and the nettles will flower not too far in the future. So, hitting that hard now will be good in the long term. 

My plan is to keep weeding the tiles/bricks already done to maintain them, and if the bricks still need a wash when we've progressed in the garden, to come back to that. 

twopenny

Fair enough because depending on who's pressure washing and what with it could be ok. Certainly in the short term.
If it causes problems you can quietly offer a solution from this thread.
Don't think people mind. It's a different scenario from the ones usually occurring so interesting.