Excited that we got our first job and just wanted to share, but a carwash reached out to us to do their carwash exit to the very last curb as you can see in the photos. Approximately 3,000sq ft.
The GM said they have been doing between 110,000-130,000 cars a year so about 10k cars a month just for simplicity. All the black in the drive you see is Tire Shine mixed with road tar, dirt, anything else that comes off of the car. This wash hasn’t been cleaned since it’s opened. But here are some before and after pics! The after pics don’t look near as good as when it was done since they open at 7 and close at 9, so there had already been a couple hundred cars go through since we got done. But tell me what you guys think!
The very last picture is just a pile of the tire shine. At the very end of all this, in their drainage ditch was a black pond that was ankle deep, about 6-10ft long and 3 foot wide.
Took us a couple of nights to do because of how much build up of tire shine there was. The GM was super nice and was super grateful for what we did this. He knew it’d take a couple nights and knew what we could cleaned in one night would get dirty before we could clean the rest. Again note that when we would stop for the night, the next business day they would have 300+ cars go through before we started again.
Carwashes are a PITA. Not bad. What did you use on it? The stain primarily comes from brake dust and virtually impossible to get completely gone. You can make it a lot less slick to walk on. The ones I do are large full service ones so they have a ton of people walking out to their cars and of course about 20 employees detailing them and the surfaces get super slick.
Our budget is tight so we started where we can. Dewalt 4GPM 4400 PSI. He also let us use their PW which was a Hotsy 5GPM couldn’t tell you the psi.
No hot water sadly. But i think we did just an okay job with cold water. The final ticket has allowed us to order a hot box from Pressure City to add on to our 4GPM.
Chemical we used was the Hurricane Degreaser from Vector Chemicals out in Ohio. Excellent product. Started to melt that tire shine after a couple mins but that tire was so thick and compacted down from all the weight of cars driving over it.
This also made it super hard to surface clean correctly, All of that debris would get stuck inside the surface and would mess with the rotation of the arms. So we ended up just turbo nozzling the whole thing. Again no hot water which would of made this 10x easier. But we had to start somewhere.
The tire shine made all the concrete hydrophobic. Could poor water down on the concrete and use your hand to wipe it dry. So i really don’t know if this had any factor in the cleaning capabilities, wether making it harder or easier. You can see in the last photo how hydrophobic it is.
Also this has turned into a monthly maintenance account for us. Around the $500 mark.
This first time around we did ): Was definitely a sob but the final total came out too a $1,000 for 3,000 sq ft.
With this completed job, we are able to get a hot box, F9 cook book and product, and spend a little more money advertising.
And then we haven’t came to a set in stone total for recurring service yet, we did let him know it’d be around the $500 mark for reoccurring. We just don’t know how dirty this wash is going to get in a month, three months etc.
You should see all these mega car washes popping up in the US. I swear there’s one on every corner. The options range from $7 to $20 for the wash and you can even buy a ‘season pass’ with unlimited washes.
@dcbrock, same here. Don’t know how they’re all going to make it. I cold called on one today. Though they don’t need doing all that often, make nice quarterly customers. Pick up a few of them and adds up at the end of the year. Really need hot water though and good explanation of expectations.
I did a car wash for a short while. The owner wanted us to clean the interior area where the cars were washed every 10 days. It never got easier, each wash was just as hard as the first one. I wouldn’t offer any discounts for future washes.
We wouldn’t be able to do the interior as it has those tracks that moves the car along while you’re in park. Then i’m between those tracks is a drain where they recycle their water. To reuse again.
Like i said we used a turbo nozzle for the whole thing because the tire shine, road tar, etc was so caked on and with a 100,000 or so cars going over top it, it compacted it even more.
And using a surface cleaner didn’t really help. Since all that debris was compacted, it would come up in chunks and get stuck up underneath the SC, causing the bars not to spin and debris getting stuck up in the holes of the SC tips.
I personally don’t think it’d be that hard for monthly maintenance on this car wash. We bought the F9 cookbook for 0.99 and just ordered the sampler pack of F9 products. And We also just ordered a Barracuda Hot Water Add-On from Pressure City.
And if we didn’t bite the bullet on this one, we wouldn’t be able to get those things to make future jobs 10x easier.
