He Remortgaged the House to Build a Pressure Washer. Then Bunnings Called and Wanted It in Every Store Across Australia. He Said No.

Anyone who has owned a ute and a mower has a story about a cord. A dog chews through one. The ute rolls over another in the driveway. A plug and an extension lead sit joined together on wet grass after the rain.

Jake had a mate, Shane, who got his own scare first. Washing his car on a damp Sunday, he felt a tingle through his hand and the safety switch tripped. It was nothing, he said. He told Jake over a beer, “Be careful with those leads. I wouldn’t run one out for that.”

Jake is a sparky. He knew better than anyone. But the pile at home was long, and the extension lead for the Gerni was sitting right there on the shed shelf.

One Saturday in early 2019 he took it out to run the Gerni and do the ute and the pavers. Months earlier the ute had rolled over that lead in the driveway, and he had coiled it back up without checking it.

He plugged it in at the wall and was walking to the tap when he looked back. His youngest, keen to help, had picked up the far end and was carrying it across the wet pavers to him. The tyre had split the plastic coating a hand’s width from the plug, and you could see the copper wire inside. Jake ran, slapped the switch off at the wall with the side of his fist, and only then took the lead out of his child’s hand. A few seconds later and his youngest would have been standing on wet pavers holding live wire.

He sat on the back step with the lead across his knees.

“It happens with the cord you’ve used a hundred times,” he says.

Then he wrapped the split in tape, hung the lead back on the shed shelf and told himself he’d replace it. A week later he flew back out.

After the lead, Jake went looking for something safer. Every machine he found ran the same way: a tap, a power point and a lead across the wet ground, with a hose to drag behind it. The big ones were heavy and awkward to move.

Megan wouldn’t go near the Gerni. It was too big and too heavy for her to move on her own, and a live lead on wet ground was a risk she didn’t want to take. She isn’t the only one. A lot of people leave the job for someone else because of it.

None of it fixed all three problems at once: the lead, the weight and the tap. So he kept looking.

Months later, in 2019, Jake was on a FIFO job at Kurobe Dam, Japan’s tallest dam, when his phone buzzed in the middle of a shift. It was Megan.

His mate Shane was in hospital. That morning he had been washing his ute with a pressure washer on an old extension lead that had been caught in the side gate for years. The plastic coating had worn through in one spot, and water had got in. When he picked up the lead off the wet grass, it was live. It threw him backwards onto the driveway. His wife found him on the ground, awake, with a burn across his palm. The hospital kept him two nights with his heart on a monitor. He recovered, and he has a scar to show for it.

Jake sat down on a pallet and rang him from the dam.

“He was laughing about it,” Jake says. “I wasn’t. I kept thinking, our lead was just like that. The one I’d taped up and hung back in the shed. Our youngest had nearly had hold of it. That’s it. No more cords near water, at work or at home.”

That afternoon, across the site, a crew was washing mud off their boots and tools with small cordless washers about the size of a cordless drill, each one fed from a plastic bucket of water. No hose, no tap, no power lead. When Jake asked, he was told nobody on that worksite wanted mains power anywhere near the water.

“Same rule I’d been living with,” he says. “They had just built the tool around it. And the pressure was right up with Gerni’s top machines.”

He took a photo and sent it to Megan with one line: this is what we need. The kids still tell their friends, “Daddy got it from Japan.”

Jake asked the crew where the washers came from, ordered one and carried it home in his bag. It worked, but it had been built for a Japanese dam site, and he wanted it to push harder and last through an Australian summer. Then COVID shut the borders, and he was home between rosters with more time than he had ever had.

He spent it in the shed. He took the machine apart down to the pump and the battery, and rebuilt it with a stronger pump and a bigger battery. Most nights, after the kids were in bed, he was out there. Megan would bring him a beer and tell him to come inside.

Then came four more years. Every few months he changed something: the pump, the battery, the case, the nozzle. Some changes made it worse, and he put them back.

It took that long because Jake had one test. It had to clean as hard as the Gerni he’d been dragging round the yard for years, without the cord and without the tap. Every prototype went up against it on the same patch of pavers. “I wasn’t putting my name on it until I couldn’t tell the two apart,” he says.

They had put everything behind it. Jake and Megan remortgaged the house to pay for the prototypes and the first run of machines. Every repayment came out of his FIFO pay, while Megan ran the house and the three kids alone for weeks at a time. If it didn’t sell, they still owed every dollar and there was no plan B.

One night, home from another trip away, Jake told Megan over dinner he was done. Megan wouldn’t let him quit. He’d come too far, she said, and they both knew what was riding on it.

The result is the Bucket Jet.

Here is what came out of the shed: