Hand car washes the truth. Detail driven

Hand Auto Cleans, The Reality.

I prefer everybody observed what I observe when I steer past a palm cars and truck laundry. It is actually opportunity to inform folks regarding what your really acquiring for your £10, 10 tiny laundry as well as the harm they are actually truly carrying out to your cars and truck. Where perform I begin.

Allows check out the comparables to start with. Many palm cars and truck cleans fee usually £15 for details as well as your maintained hanging around just 20-30 moments. I bill just depending on lorry dimension £60 for a Servicing Information which basically is their ‘details’ as well as take about 2.5 hrs. If you perform the mathematics’s your really paying out the equal simply I take 5x a lot longer, therefore why invest even more?

The initial bottom line is actually when I carry out a Servicing Information my objective is actually to provide the highest degree of well-maintained, as carefully as achievable making use of premium items guarding as well as preserving your cars and truck as well as its own security. Their intention is actually to wash your cars and truck in the quickest method achievable whatsoever, implying they make use of low-cost, very vigorous chemicals to malfunction the filth as well as thrill around your cars and truck if you want to maximize area for the upcoming cars and truck ahead In. They need to have to operate the most affordable achievable expenses, this implies the even more vigorous the chemical to wash your cars and truck the a lot less of it they need to have as well as the usually the much cheaper it is actually.

In today times almost all cars and trucks are actually created as well as completed in various means. Tires as an example, you could possibly possess buffed, coated, precious stone decrease or even silk appearances thereby implying that various items are actually demanded to make sure these completed are actually cleaned up carefully without lessening or even tarnishing the appeal of the tire. Hand cars and truck cleans perform rule out this as well as make use of tire ACID to clean up any sort of form of tire. I have actually found initial palm what tire acid performs to sleek tires as well as silk appearances tires as well as its own certainly not quite! I also possessed a client just recently along with a dark Array Wanderer along with dark tires, he took it to the regional palm cars and truck rinse where they spattered on tire acid, it was actually a scorching time as well as his tires were actually warm coming from steering because of this the acid had actually dried out as well as cooked on due to the opportunity they related to wash it off, as a result it had actually daubed throughout the tire as well as will certainly not go over. That is actually a tire refurb on every tire! Any sort of detailer will certainly lug several items appropriate for several appearances to make sure when cleaning up all areas as well as finishings on the cars and truck are actually carefully cleaned up caring for the surface as well as security.

Acid Damaged Steering Wheel (Graphic Resource: Meguiars Online)

Any person that’s takes an avid interest in detailing or just an enthusiast knows one of the fundamentals of the process is using two buckets, one clean water and one soapy to wash the car with. The reason for this is to wash off your grubby wash mitt that you’ve just taken off the paint into the plain bucket to rinse off the dirt then put it into nice clean soapy water to put back onto the car. However this appears to be a myth at any hand car wash. Next time you visit a wash and scratch take a look inside the drum they pull their mitts out of, it will most likely be full of black soapy water which has washed anywhere from 50- 100 cars in a day. If you turn up at the end of the day they are essentially washing your car with the dirt off 75 other cars adding a nice swirly finish for free! But that is actually not the main issue for me, the main issue is that they don’t actually use the nice dirty water all that much, instead they grab a dripping wet wash mitt and use it to wash near enough half a car before rinsing it off again and taking it back to your paint. So they are dragging half a cars worth of dirt across the car adding more to your stunning swirl effect!

Heavy swirling and marring caused by weekly hand car washes.

The next issue with their wash process is the shampoo they use and how it diminishes and degrades any protection on your car. pH Neutral shampoo is essential when cleaning you’re car to ensure any wax or even coating currently protecting the paintwork is left behind after washing. I only use pH neutral shampoos which do exactly what they say, contain no harsh or aggressive chemicals and most importantly, no acids. The shampoo they use will have a wide variety of aggressive chemicals in it which will break down and lift all kinds of dirt quickly and effectively including sap and bird mess with little agitation, which is great but not so great for your wax or coatings. After only a couple of hand car washes you can wave goodbye to any protection you or the dealership applied meaning your paintwork is left bare and open to a wide variety of foreign bodies which damage your paint such as bird mess, acid rain, bugs, tar and salt!

To me it’s common sense and I really can’t see how people cannot see what they are doing to their paintwork. The amount of damage that can be caused in one wash is mind blowing. Don’t get me wrong some are much worse than others and you wouldn’t believe me but the dealerships are by far the worse. Audi for example, they employ fleet valeters who arrive each morning. I’ve had the joy of working alongside these cowboys and what I witnessed is not for the faint hearted! In the time it took me to deep clean, decontaminate and dry an Audi A1 (2.5 Hours), they "cleaned" 9 cars! While cleaning these 9 cars the leather which they dry the cars off with was jet washed off, on the floor twice! On concrete with grit and dirt being pressure washed into the fibers of the leather. I nearly passed out when I saw it!

Trails left behind by Fleet Valeters at Audi Main Dealer when they attempted to remove a mark on the bonnet.

So back to your local hand car wash, after they have stripped all the dirt with harsh aggressive chemicals, given the dirt on your car a good wash around with dirt off other cars too, they then rinse it all off in preparation to dry the car with the dreaded Chamois leather. Although these can be very effective at absorbing water and drying your car, unfortunately they can also easily inflict a lot of damage onto the surface of your paintwork in the form of light scratches, swirl marks and marring. A chamois leather is an animal rawhide which means it has obviously not been ‘designed’ for the sole purpose of drying a car, which means that you are compromising the safety of your paintwork if you use one. The make up of a chamois leather means that any small stray particles of dirt on the surface of your car become trapped between the paintwork and the chamois during the drying phase and are therefore drawn across it which results in the fine scratches and swirl marks. Chamois leathers also dry hard so even if simply a small part of it is actually not sufficiently dampened and softened before you begin drying, marring could be inflicted onto the surface of your paintwork. There are synthetic chamois also available but these too suffer from the same disadvantages that a natural chamois leather does.

If all of that hasn’t deterred you yet, then getting home to see the really poor level of clean should! Wheel dishes are always left heavily soiled, arches still caked, grills still with a film of dirt and the corners of alloys still baked up. Even better than that is when they leave dirt lying in your drainage channels and you drive off down the road and the water lying in the drainage wells runs out down the door taking the dirt with it leaving a lovely dirty streak down side of the car.

I appreciate that most people to be honest don’t care and love the convenience of a hand car wash but more and more I’m being asked why is my car so dull, what is causing all those marks in the paint and why does it get dirty so quick and people are bemused when I tell them it’s actually how they are cleaning their car which is making their car so technically dirty!

Im not tarring everyone with the same brush, I know some people do look after their own cars but those that currently use hand car washes please take note, it’s not too late. Book your car in to have some level of machine work either an Enhancement Detail or Correction Detail to remove the damage inflicted by hand car washes and then either have it maintained by me here at Detail Driven or book yourself in on my one course designed to teach you how to safely maintain your car in and out, at the end you’ll be given a hamper of products to safely maintain your car with safe products.

On the left are swirl marks caused by poor maintenance and washing, the right hand side received a correction detail to remove heavy swirling and deep scratches caused during washing and years of poor maintenance.

You really are not getting anything different by paying £5, £7 or £15. They all use the same chemicals, same poor processes and same terrible results. Rather than spending £10 a week at a hand car wash, why not save your £10 up and once a month have it maintained properly by myself for most likely the same price you would have paid over the past four weeks but a much higher level of clean making use of products designed to safely well-maintained your cars and truck along with a 10x far better result. An absolute no brainer! Reserve yours in now right here!