Pilot to power washer: Student's idea takes flight

Forbes highlighted ASU senior Zach Hamilton's start-up venture DevilWash.  

"As a freshman at Arizona State University’s flight school in the fall of 2008, Zach Hamilton noticed that the single engine propeller training planes were covered with dirt and muck," writes Susan Adams of Forbes. "That gave Hamilton, then 18, an idea: 'I wanted to start a company to wash the aircraft,' he says. 'When you’ve got a surface that dirty, it picks up a lot of drag.'"

"He won $2,000 in a campus entrepreneurship competition for his plan to blast aircraft with high-pressure jets of water, then suck up and cart away the waste water, so it wouldn’t pool and create hazardous runway slicks. But when he tried to get the business off the ground, he found it would cost a prohibitive $20,000 a year to insure the plane’s safety post-cleaning.

"In early 2009, Hamilton changed course and started DevilWash, a power washing service that filters and re-uses most of its water. To date, the company has pulled in $30,000 in profits on sales of $50,000 and its small but growing client list includes a strip mall, several apartment blocks and a $20,000 job cleaning parking structures for Arizona State."

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