I was wondering if any of the “teeming masses” included some car wash owner/operators like myself. This industry is an interesting, incestuous and overly-secretive one.
And, since we deal with John Q Public, you never know what kind of behavior to expect from the multitude of customers that pass through your store.
Me, I run a couple Express exterior-only conveyorized washes in Cincinnati. All kinds of stories abound, from equipment failures at crucial volume peaks, attempted theft, accidents in the tunnel, employees behaving like the high-schoolers they are, etc.
I thought that maybe this would be a spot where we could congregate and swap stories about our profession…during what is now the busiest time of the year.
Also, anyone from the “outside” as a customer have any carwash-related questions, I guess this could be the place to answer those, too. Or comment. Or whatever.
We have one of those “Laserwash 3000” touchless carwash bays in our small town. It was the older type where you had to drive your left front tire onto a special plate to let the carwash know you were in position. You had to accelerate a little to get on the pad, but if you accelerated too much you went right over and had to back up.
Once there was a lady in a Toyota Celica convertible in front of me that while trying to get her wheel on the pad had gotten herself turned at an almost 45 degree angle in the bay. She got out and sheepishly asked me if I could straighten her up, which I did without too much trouble.
Lucikly the new LaserWash doesn’t have that wheel pad to drive up on, it automatically adjusts to wherever you are. Of course it now costs $6.00 and up as opposed to the $3.00 minimum on the old one.
I’ve had people put the car in drive and stomp on the accelerator, rearending the car in front of them, I’ve had people brake in the middle of the wash process, causing them to “jump” the rollers that push the car through the wash, resulting in the next car back being forced into the rear of the immobilized car…I even had a guy decide he didn’t want to wait for the drying process to complete and he put his car in gear and drove through the exit door…and then tried to blame us for scratching his paint with the door which wasn’t ready to open yet!
You name it, it’s happened*…working at the carwash…whoa, whoa, whoa at the carwash, yeah…*
We have cameras all over the place hooked up to a DVR recorder…saved us from many a fraudulent damage claim…and I’ve seen some questionable shit go on…blowjobs in the tunnel, drug deals at the vac islands, everything.
The best story about our vacuums is when I was sheepishly approached by a early-twenties dude asking me if we had “found anything” inside our vacs recently (he pointed to a specific vacuum that he said he had used), and asked if there was a way to check inside the unit. When pressed to elaborate, he kinda shrugged and went on his way.
Later I opened up the collection bag inside the vacuum and found a small baggie of pot.
Touchless carwashes absolutely suck. They simply cannot get a car clean like a gentle friction soft-cloth wash can, which is what we are. The only downside to a friction wash is the occaisonal damage, which is almost always confined to a side mirror, a rear wiper arm/blade, or the occaisonal power antenna that won’t retract (which by definition is broken anyway, so we aren’t responsible for those).
My car has many spots of dried pine sap all over it, from last summer when I had to park under a pine tree. Is there any alternative to (1) lots and lots of hard work or (2) learning to live with them?
Question from a car owner: what is the best way to make sure a carwash is not spraying recycled water loaded with salt onto my car in the winter?
I recently had to take a one-month trip and leave my car in a garage for a month. This was the middle of winter, and so I decided to take it to a self-service car wash and spray all the salt off first.
I went to one car wash, which seemed like a decent place, sprayed off the car for five minutes, and left. I get back to the garage, and find it absolutely covered with salt deposits. Pissed, I drive 20 minutes to another car wash, spray it off again, only to come back home and find the same thing. Out of time, and with a plane to catch, I just left it for a month, covered in salt.
When I was psychiatric nursing I had the best position in the whole hospital. We had a kind of halfway house work setup at the garage across the road. I had a team of psych patients, all about to go back in to the community, and we hand washed fleet cars for local businesses. The garage and the hospital split the profits. It was nice leisurely work for me and the guys and gals I had working for me. When we would finish one car I would drive it back and pick up the next one. If no-one drove in for a wash the patients got a break. I had different workers all the time and it was good fun, particularly since it was a hot summer.
Unfortunately one of the other nurses failed an exam for the second time and couldn’t work on the wards so I swapped jobs with him so he didn’t have to resign. I never got my car wash job back before I left but Dave did pass the exam 6 months later.
Have lots of wax on the car to keep this from happening as easily. But it will still happen.
Once you have a certain amount of junk on your car, especially stuff like salt, touchless car washes won’t take everything off. You have to go to one of those carwashes with the roller things or hand wash it.
I don’t know, personally I think touch carwashes absolutely suck. They leave scratches all over the finish from the grit that accumulates on the brushes (and maybe the material they are made of to begin with).
But, not everyone is willing to spend the few minutes to hand-wash their car, so they drive around in cars that look like someone took a Brillo pad to them.
No. Automatic carwashes will not remove it. I would reccommend ye olde “Bug and Tar Remover” or a similar solvent-based product with a rag and some elbow grease. It is the only way to get rid of it other than to decide to live with it being there.
Tree sap is VERY difficult to remove…it is like GLUE on your clearcoat and the longer you let it sit there, especially in hot months, the more adhered to your car it will be. Park somewhere else if you can.
Good on ya mate! Just don’t handwash your car if you actually give a hoot about it’s finish…unless you take certain precautions, handwashing is MORE scratchy to your car’s finish than an automatic wash that uses microfiber soft cloth like ours…because most folks use sponges which have tons of pores that trap grit and you subsequently scrape that grit across your finish…
The only way to truly handwash your car is to have seperate buckets, microfiber hand-mitts and follow it with a chamois dry and a wax. This of course uses way more water than a reputable auto wash where you can just towel dry the remaining water with a microfiber and then wax it…wax is ONLY to be applied by hand to painted surfaces…it doesn’t belong on your windshield, headlight lens covers, tires, etc…which is the only way an auto wash can apply such a product…by carpet bombing it.
Most carwashes use reclaimed water, as does ours. But smart carwash owner/operators (especially in the self serve category) will NOT use reclaimed water for rinsing, drying agents, clearcoat protectants and the like. It’s generally OK to use that reclaim water (which is less a cost-saving measure than an environmental/zoning one) with basic soaps, etc as long as there is a soft water/reverse osmosis rinse to remove the TDS (total dissolved solids) from the wash process.
That same logic applies to ANY kind of wash, whether they use reclaim water or not. You simply cannot put hard water on a car during the rinse cycle (which reclamated water is, amongst other things…like generally being smelly) after it has been cleaned or it will not dry properly nor will it have a relative lack of spotting without the RO treated water.
Reclaim water has also been known to not “set up” the car properly for drying due to it’s inherent “sliminess” whereby it “sticks” to a car.
You’d be surprised to know that most carwashes (including ours) use a Hydroflouric-based soap and/or wheel cleaner.
As noxious as HF is, there simply isn’t a definitive substitute for HF for wheel cleaning and “setting up” a car for a sparkly finish and the way it’s dried.
The evolution of modern carwashes is quite different than “your father’s Oldsmobile”. Most automatic washes today NEVER employ what most folks refer to as “brushes” (ye olde bristle brushes from the 1980’s that certainly WOULD scratch your car) but use what are called “wraps” and “high side washers” and such that are made entirely of a fabric that is microfiber in nature and specifically designed to not retain grit and rely instead on retaining many times their weight in water as well as lubricating, low-Ph soaps to do their job.
My carwash emphatically does NOT scratch cars, as I willfully run both my 2006 vehicles through them daily on what are called “test washes”, which is a way to ensure the equipment is operating properly, but is more likely a “free wash” that the manager enjoys…
Cool thread. I just bought a new car, so I’ll be checking this a lot.
I still have my old car, which is dark blue. When I get it washed (one of those brusheless places at a gas station) and after it dries, I can always see those spots where water has dried. Does that mean it’s time for more wax or is it something else?
I have found that entirely spot-free rinsing is a myth. There’s a couple reasons.
One is that (and the variance in sizes, angles and shapes of vehicles plays a part in this) residual hard water and/or soaps can get trapped in places on a car (the most obvious places are behind the side mirrors and in the door seams) where the final “spot-free” rinse (Reverse-Osmosis and softened water) cannot flush it out, and then during the drying stage the blowers will blow this dissolved solid-riddled liquid back onto your freshly clean and dried car. This soapy/hard water will definetely spot when it dries.
Another potential reason is that operators can be less than scrupulous about maintaining proper filtration cleaniliness, softening, etc and that their final rinse water (RO water) is overly hard to begin with, which will also spot when it dries.
The former is generally the most common, and I can’t tell ya how many owners of open-bedded pickup trucks have bitched at me about how our overhead blowers blow the soapy water trapped in their open bed onto the sides of their freshly washed truck, as if they fail to understand a very simple concept about how the way their vehicle is designed is what is causing the issue, not our process.
