A meticulous hand washing of your vehicle starts with the water. Using filtered or deionized water, this will insure that all minerals are removed from the water. Minerals in water will cause water marks and etch through the paint’s clear coat if left long enough.

Next up is choosing the proper soap for your application, are you doing a maintenance wash or are you washing the vehicle before applying a fresh coat of wax or a ceramic coating. For a maintenance wash, we always recommend a specific automotive car wash soap. Now for the ago old question of “Can I use dish soap to wash my car?”. You shouldn’t, as it will dry out rubber seals around the window and strip any type of car wax or paint sealant off.

 But if you are reapplying a fresh coat of wax or a ceramic coating, you need to remove any type of wax, sealant or oils, to have bare paint for your new coat to bond properly. This is extremely important if you are applying a ceramic coating, we even go to the extent of wiping the vehicle down with a prep solvent to further remove any type wax that may not have been removed in the wash process. 

Its important to recognize the purpose of the car wash, just to clean the vehicle, use a automotive soap, to remove waxes and sealants, us a soft dish soap, we recommend Dawn dish soap as its great at degreasing but soft enough not to dry out rubber seals.

Now that the water and soaps are sorted out we can start the car wash process. First step is to foam the whole car with soap to help breakdown and loosen the dirt, then we pressure wash using hot water to rinse off all loose particles. After the rinse process, we hand wash the vehicle with the two bucket method to insure we are not dragging any dirt over the painted surfaces. What is the two bucket method? It’s two wash buckets, one with clean water and one with soapy water, you start with the wash mitt in the soapy water, soap one entire panel, then rinse the mitt off in the clean water bucket, then back into the soapy bucket and back onto the car.

Another important aspect is to use clean drying towels, all of our drying towels are used once, then thrown in the wash. Using a dirty drying towel over and over again, will collect dirt and will scratch a car overtime. On the topic of drying, we use a 8 horsepower blower that blows warm air. This is to blow all the water out of the cracks. The reason why this is important, is because what’s the point of all the effort to properly washing a car and then the minute you drive away all the water leaks out from every crack ruining the look of your clean car. These are a few of many little details in cleaning a car.