How to Protect Your Hearing While Pressure Washing

How to Protect Your Hearing While Pressure Washing

When regularly lifting and carrying heavy things, whether for work or as part of a fitness regimen, your body will adapt by developing and strengthening your muscles. Constant rough work with your two hands and your palms and fingers will develop tough calluses as a protective layer. Your pupils protect you from extremely bright light sources by instantaneously limiting the size of the hole to limit the amount of light hitting the retina.

Those are just some of the mechanisms in which our body reacts and adapts to external stimuli. Because we are so used to the fast-changing nature of our bodies, we tend to ignore or even forget the fact that our sense of hearing has no mechanisms in place to react or protect itself against loud sounds.


Otolaryngologists, doctors specialising in ears, nose and throat, have said that there is no available treatment, medicine, surgery or even medical devices that can completely rehabilitate our sense of hearing once it is damaged by loud noise.
Exposure to loud noise slowly kills the nerve endings in the inner ear canal. The longer the exposure to loud noise, the more nerve endings are destroyed. As the amount of nerve endings in the ear decreases, your ability to hear is slowly diminished. The damage is permanent. There is no way to restore lost hearing.


Hearing loss is one of the dangers faced by people using a pressure washer.

Losing your sense of hearing is painless, unlike other disorders and ailments, and the decline slowly develops over a period of several years. You won't notice that you're losing your sense of hearing until serious damage has occurred. Many labour regulatory agencies all over the world have hearing conservation standards in place to protect workers.


The United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration is one of these regulatory agencies concerned with workers' health and safety. They have instituted workplace standards to protect the hearing of workers. For instance, one of their safety standards requires employers to provide hearing protectors at no cost to employees regularly exposed to 85 decibels of noise and greater.


The agency takes hearing protection seriously. Over a five-year period, over 10,000 workplace violations were recorded, and penalties exceeding $7.5 million meted out. Some of these violations include failure to train employees, failure to keep adequate records, failure to monitor noise and failure to initiate a noise mitigation program.


Professional pressure washers must institute a noise conversation program to protect their employees from hearing loss. The pressure washing industry has to be adaptable due to the changing nature of the workplace. Pressure washers tend to work in a wide variety of environments, further complicating noise conversation measures.


It's not enough to buy ear plugs. The employer must establish a comprehensive hearing conservation program. It's not particularly difficult-the aim is to cover all bases to ensure nothing gets overlooked. Here are some components of a program.


Since the workplace can differ from one day to the next, the initial testing may be skipped and it can be automatically assumed that the area is a noise hazard. Employees may wear personal devices that measure sound.


The ones in the frontline, the pressure washer users, will have to be given annual hearing tests. This is the only way to gauge whether the program is effective and whether their hearing is damaged. By comparing data from a set period of time, the employer can tell whether their program is effective or not.


The most basic part of the program is providing industry-standard hearing protectors like ear plugs and ear muffs to the employees. The employees will also have to be trained about the hazards of loud noise, the use and maintenance of hearing protectors, and matters relating to the hearing conservation program.


Lastly, the employer must keep records regarding the hearing conservation program. The regulatory agency may summon these records at any time for their perusal.