Nope. That's the whole point. I don't have to clean up any of this poison oak. So, I can take my time.
Basically, when I get in the mood for a good fight, I head down to the ravine for battle. It's really more of a hobby to figure out how to defeat the poison oak, to beat it at its own game - and not get rashed in the process.
It has been a tough battle - but I've learned a lot in just the past few days, so, eventually, I'll know the secret.
Today I talked to a pharmacist. I must have gotten a bad apple because she kept telling me it's for women and that it won't work on the skin and that it wasn't an "approved purpose".
I need to find a pharmacist who can actually think out of the box. (It doesn't seem to be their specialty as all they do is follow the rules.)
I once argued for five minutes with a pharmacist who didn't want to fill my prescription for four 85 cc doses of Lovenox. "Only comes in fifty and a hundred." I finally convinced him I am capable of squirting fifteen CC into the sink.
I have a similar "while I have the time" project. I collect rocks out of a farmer's field, and fill mudholes with them. One I've been working on, is where the utility guys pull off the road to do phone wiring. The mudhole is probably four by 10 feet or so. I've put in a bunch of buckets of rocks, and I'm falling behind. The mudhole is still there.
A few years back, I used buckets of rock to fill the sink holes at my church, next to the storm drain.
Farmers are better off without the rocks, and the rest of the world is better off without the sink holes. I only harvest rocks between crops, won't walk on shoots or harvestable crops.
I also am not all that impressed with "in the box" thinkers.
Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus
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Nope. That's the whole point. I don't have to clean up any of this poison oak. So, I can take my time.
Basically, when I get in the mood for a good fight, I head down to the ravine for battle. It's really more of a hobby to figure out how to defeat the poison oak, to beat it at its own game - and not get rashed in the process.
It has been a tough battle - but I've learned a lot in just the past few days, so, eventually, I'll know the secret.
Today I talked to a pharmacist. I must have gotten a bad apple because she kept telling me it's for women and that it won't work on the skin and that it wasn't an "approved purpose".
I need to find a pharmacist who can actually think out of the box. (It doesn't seem to be their specialty as all they do is follow the rules.)
It depends a LOT on what's in the milk, and, what your body does to it. The entire process is complicated, and I don't profess to fully understand it.
But, it starts with urushiol & T cells.
The actual urushiol is a benzene ring with two hydroxides (i.e., a catechol), with a specific alkyl group which is slightly different depending on species (e.g., poison ivy = 15 carbon chain, poison oak = 17 carbon chain). This molecule is harmless, and it, in and of itself, does not provoke the immune response.
The immune response is complicated in so much as the longer carbon chains in poison oak sap appear to have a greater immune response than the shorter ones of ivy ... and ... the more unsaturated the chain (i.e., double bonds), the more our immune systems react to it (at least it says so in Wikipedia).
Once on the skin, the oil penetrates to the lower antigen-presenting immune cells whose job is to capture foreign invaders and transport them to the lymph notes to be presented as evidence to the specific white blood cells which had matured in the thymus in front of your heart, and which play a role in the cell mediated immune response.
Since T cells, which originate in the bone marrow, randomly mutate in the thymus, some of those mutations select for "self" proteins. But that's bad news for the body, so the thymus has a system for weeding out these miscreants.
Unfortunately, what the thymus lets out are T cells who have receptors that key for the quinole that the urushiol oxidizes to. Hence the rash.
Point is, this is a complicated mechanism, which, we have only two basic approaches to combat:
Build up an immunity (i.e., don't create Tcells coded for the quinone) or
Remove the quinone from the body as soon as you can
I'm working on the second approach ... you've resolved the first.
Every power washer I've ever seen has a place to attach a tube for sucking up liquid, often there's a port right on the spray gun housing ... most normal brained folks would ask the power washer's customer service department... and it's really dumb to ask about a power washer without indicating the brand/model number.
i have a weed sprayer container that sucks via an venturi, that attaches to a regular hose that will easily shoot 20' in a stream, or can be adjusted to spray in a fan. it only cost a few dollars at the borg.
Instructions are likely in the owner's manual. This looks like the same unit... it automatically mixes concentrates. Powerwashers usually suck concentrate only with the lowest pressure tip, because they're designed to apply the cleaner and then let it sit, not wash it right off. If you can't find instructions in the owner's manual phone the manufacturer.
Thanks for the picture of that weed sprayer. It appears to use a garden hose as part of the apparatus?
I mentioned somewhere in this thread that this infestation of poison oak starts something like 400 or 500 feet from the house (I haven't meaured it but it's easily a football field away), and goes for a few hundred feet further in the downhill direction.
It's not impossible to handle 500 feet of garden hose (I probably have just about that much already) ... it's not the easiest approach.
Personally I'm looking for a more portable solution for the mountain folks like me who have hilly acreage.
Getting your pressure washer to suck out of another container may be as simple as connecting the correct nozzle on the end of the wand. Going on failing memory, once had one that required a very open nozzle to be attached to the wand to suck the correct cleaning solution from a container but without the maximum pressure. Might be worth a try.
Mine sucks out of the tank(s) when the "soap" nozzle is inserted in the wand. With the other nozzles the pressure is too high to suck the soap out of the tanks.
Still need the hose. AIUI, the pressure washer uses a venturi too pull the soap out of the container. Without water the pump would probably overheat, too. The water is a coolant as well as a lubricant.
I 'could' hook up a few hoses (I bought a few of the gray Costco 3/4" "industrial" 100-foot hoses a couple of years ago.
They're actually crummy hoses (they kink too much compared to rubber), but they're long. I'd only need four of them but in reality, I was looking for a more portable solution once I'm down there, in the ravine, surrounded by the poison oak.
I can, of course, google for it (or something similar), and, I can ask Cosco - I think that's where I bought it - for the company name, but, I didn't try all that hard simply because I 'suspected' I need to drag four hundred feet of garden hose - which - isn't really all that useful.
Plus, I won't be spraying a huge swath, 20 feet to 50 feet deep without the leaves berrys being on the vine, as I'd be wasting my time.
In addition, I DO plan on spraying what I cut as I learned from this thread that I MUST spray within five minutes (before the sap reverses), but, for that, since it was just cut, I should have access with the hand sprayer.
So, there is no rush on figuring out HOW the sprayer works.
On a different note ... I put the camera strap in the bleach wash:
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I was surprised. I had expected it to come out WHITE (I used a LOT of pool chlorine - which is double strength of normal chlorine).
That strap came out better than new.
In addition, the camera is now fully swabbed down with the 1:1:1 mixture of oxidizer + wetting agent + surfactant ... so let's hope the wife & kids don't come down with the itchies in the next week!
I like that sentiment. Duplicate others' success and not failures!
That's apropos because many people just dive in, and that duplicates the failures, and few report back the successes so others can follow.
Yeah. One thing I learned by doing is that Nikon camera straps are STRONG!
Look at this picture:
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That camera strap was just washed with the whites (socks, underwear, towels, sheets, etc.) for a 90 minute hot wash with the bleach dispenser filled with 12% pool chlorine (that's twice the strength of household bleach).
I had fullyy expected the camera strap to turn white (or brown), and for the faux leather to peel off - but it all looks like it's brand new!
Who would have thought that the Nikon camera strap was that hardy!
Methinks you will need the garden hose hooked up also. Even the cheap pressure washers use 1.8 gallons per minute so you would need a 55 gallon drum to give you any spray time at all and that could get quite expensive depending on herbicide used.
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