The short answer
Dryvit and other EIFS claddings are a thin acrylic finish coat over a fiberglass-mesh base coat and foam insulation board — pressure washing cracks and cavitates that finish and can drive water behind the system, where trapped moisture rots sheathing invisibly. EIFS cleans safely only by soft washing: cleaning solution at garden-hose pressure, dwell time, and a gentle rinse.
What EIFS Actually Is
Exterior Insulation and Finish System — Dryvit is the brand most people know — is a layer cake, not a masonry wall: rigid foam insulation board attached to the sheathing, a thin cementitious base coat with embedded fiberglass mesh, and a textured acrylic finish coat measured in millimeters. It looks like stucco and performs beautifully as insulation, which is why it's all over Metro Detroit's 1980s-to-2000s custom homes, bank branches, and commercial storefronts. But everything about cleaning it follows from that construction: the visible surface is a paint-thickness membrane over foam that dents like a cooler.
What Pressure Does to It
A pressure washer working close enough to clean EIFS is working hard enough to hurt it. The finish coat cracks, chips, and cavitates — small craters where the stream punched through to base coat, gouges where it caught an edge — and foam behind the finish compresses, leaving dents the wall wears permanently. Worse than the visible damage is the invisible kind: driven water finds every crack, sealant joint, and penetration, and gets behind the system.
The Moisture Stake Is the Real One
Moisture behind EIFS is the material's famous weakness — older barrier-type installations in particular have no drainage path, so water that gets behind the cladding stays there, soaking sheathing and framing while the wall looks fine outside. That failure mode is exactly what careless washing risks recreating in an afternoon, and it's why high-pressure cleaning typically violates EIFS manufacturers' care guidance and can void warranty coverage. A wall system whose one rule is 'keep bulk water out of the assembly' should never meet a machine designed to inject water at a hundred times hose pressure.
How EIFS Actually Gets Cleaned
Soft washing was practically invented for this material. The cleaning solution — mixed for the biology and grime actually on the wall — is applied at garden-hose pressures, given time to work, and rinsed gently; algae and mildew die at the root, atmospheric grime releases, and the finish coat never experiences force. The texture that makes EIFS attractive also makes it hold dirt in its pores, so dwell time and the right surfactants do the work pressure can't do safely. Sealant joints and penetrations get visually checked as we work — a failing joint is worth a heads-up long before it's worth a repair bill — and heavily shaded elevations get the same root-kill treatment and honest regrowth expectations as any shade-side wall.
The Bottom Line
EIFS is one of the easiest materials in Michigan to clean correctly and one of the easiest to ruin: chemistry, patience, and faucet-level pressure on one side; cracks, cavities, and hidden rot on the other. If a crew quotes your Dryvit home without saying the words 'soft wash,' keep interviewing — and if you'd like it done by people who treat the finish coat like the membrane it is, that's our standard method, on homes and commercial frontage alike.
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