Are you concerned about hard water spots when washing and drying your vehicle?

[Mike Phillips]

We would appreciate your feedback, comments and suggestions on the topic or washing your car.

Thank you for participating in our poll!


Question 1

Are you concerned about hard water spots on your paint when washing and drying your vehicle?

[RamAirV1]

Hard water spots are one of the most difficult things to remove from paint. It is best to avoid them, rather than remove them.

I also go out of my way to avoid sprinkers that recklessly spray water into the street and onto cars. This is one thing that really makes me mad!

RamAirV1

[Rick]

RamAirV1,

I totally agree with ya. I even threw my car in to a full panic skid once and stopped traffic to prevent having to drive under water spraying on to the road from a broken sprinkler head once. Of course our Phoenix water is some of the harder water around too.

[Unreal]

Yes I am.

I battle this constantly and have found that the NXT wash does help out alot in this.

[Rockpick]

Our water here is pretty hard and contains copius amounts of calcium. It's an UPHILL battle to stay ahead of the game with a black vehicle.

I've explored filtration/softening systems. They're just so pricey...

RP

[RamAirV1]

I just had the faucet in the garage hooked up to the house water softener. It makes a big difference.

RamAirV1

[Aurora40]

I'm concerned in the sense that I don't want hard water spots on my car. But I don't struggle with it. I think maybe it's technique combined with pretty decent water.

If you are asking because Meg's is considering a de-ionized rinse, can I suggest a couple things that would be key to me?

One is for the filter to have decent capacity (would be nice to be able to use it for a whole wash if I wanted, not just final rinsing, and if used for just final rinsing, you shouldn't have to totally chintz out and make just one "optimum" pass in order to have enough filtering to rinse 2-3 cars. I should be able to rinse generously, overlapping on parts, maybe rinsing twice, etc, and still do 5 or more cars, IMO.

The other is to include some kind of nozzle. I've toyed with the notion of a DI filter for a while now, and probably the one biggest factor is that I feel it will have very low water flow, and that with my Ultimate Nozzle, or most hose nozzles, it will just piddle out the end and not actually spray very well.

A bypass on the filter, and perhaps a nozzle with two modes, big flow unfiltered, and small flow filtered spray, would also be nice, though I'd probably just use the Ultimate Nozzle and then screw on whichever filtered nozzle it had, as the Ultimate Nozzle is pretty ultimate...

[AZScooter]

I wash cars commercially and we use DI water all of the time. It does not have to be ridiculously expensive and you can use a set up in the garage. You just need to find a supplier for it. Culligan and Ionics are both decent suppliers for DI water systems. You just have to negotiate a low volume price from them, and you will be good to go.

AzScooter

[damonswank]

Spots from hard water

This is an easy problem to solve -- but not particularly cheap.

Rayne Water Company (and others, I am sure) will provide a tank just like your water softener. It will turn about 1,000 gallons of water into deinonized (this is ditstilled water, not "soft" water."

It is about $35 a month. Every once in a while you replace the canister at a cost of perhaps $40.

Note that you do not use this water to wash your car. You use it to rinse the car. Distilled water (no minerals) has many other uses around the house: steam irons, windows, etc.

Damon Swank

[AZScooter]

Deionized and distilled water are totally different.
There are three types of ultra pure water. I hope to explain the difference so that it is clear.
DI or Deionized water is passed through a resin bed to neutralize the electrical charge of any ions or metals that it contains. When this happens water cannot conduct electricity. In order to do this there are tow types of resin beds that can be used. teh first is what is called a CA bed. You have two tanks and one removes or neutralizes the cations and the other removes the anions. The other is mixed bed, and actually has the cation and anion resins mixed together. The final product is water that has lost it's ability to conduct electricity because of the neutralized metal elements in the water. Think of a magnet that has been demagnetized. This is usually the choice of mobile detailers because the size of the tanks lend themselves to portability and let you process water on site. INteresting trivia, the Intel plant in Chandler, Arizona purifies the water they use after the manufacturing process in a huge DI plant, and then injects back into the underground aquifer. This was one of the conditions of them being able to build the plant.

RO water is microfiltered, usually through a ceramic filter. This totally removes the metal particles or bad things that cause water hardness by filtration. It also removes chemicals that might be in the water that you drink, such as Chlorine, etc. This method can be a little cheaper than DI water because of the filtration process, although both of them run 5 to 10 cents a gallon to process the water. Of course this all depends on the are that you live in. If you are in a hard water area, such as the desert southwest, or Alaska or somewhere else where the city id very dependent on under ground aquifers for drinking water it will be more expensive. If they depend on lakes and rivers for drinking water then it is a little less expensive. For a professional detailer, all of the water would have to be processed at their home or office and transported via tank.

Disitlled water is actually done through a distillation process. That means the water is actually boiled and the steam is recaptured and chilled to make it water. This leaves all of the metal particles behind in the hot tank and ideally leaves pure water behind. This is probably the most ponderous method to purify water. It is also probably the least pure method of the three, and the most ponderous for our uses.

Now to give you an idea of the levels of purity...
In the manufacturing process for electronics, they use DI water. It is the most pure and thus the most useful, because tehre is no chance of residues being left behind.
For Soda pop and such, it is typically RO water. This will remove any impurities that might change the taste of what you are thinking.
Distilled is the oldest technology, and also the slowest. I cannot think right off hand of any industrial uses of distliied water, although I know that my mom used to use distilled water in her iron in the '60's to make it last longer, because the RO technonllgy and DI technology were not fully developped.

And there I go, I probably made it as clear as mud. This is something that I have been dealing with on a daily basis for nearly twenty years now.

[Mike Phillips]

Originally posted by AZScooter
Deionized and distilled water are totally different.
There are three types of ultra pure water. I hope to explain the difference so that it is clear.

And there I go, I probably made it as clear as mud. This is something that I have been dealing with on a daily basis for nearly twenty years now.

Wow!

Thanks for the education on the different types of water AZScooter. I know I for one am thankful to you for sharing your wealth of knowledge.



Mike

[damonswank]

Your explanation of water treatment techniques is absolutely fascinating.

Is the DI treatment that Rayne (for example) uses really the best trreatment available? Is it the one we should use?

My take on your exposition is that the DI treatment is the best. It results in the most pure water than we can achieve. You say that industry uses it for the most exacting applications.

The bottom line: if we want really clean water, we use the DI service, as I suggested?

Thanks very much.

Damon Swank

[AZScooter]

You need to be careful with Rayne. I don't know about LA, but in Mesa they offer water softening tanks that are similar, but not the same as DI water. What they offer is not much better than a salt exchange water softener.
If it is DI then it should be good.

There are a couple of things to be concerned about with DI water. It is VERY corrosive. It will not have an effect on your car, and its finish, but it will eat up soft metals, such as the brass in a pressure washer pump, over time. Pure water is acidic. So think of it as running a very mild acid through something metal for an extended period of time. That happens with DI water is that the minerals that help tap water have a neutral pH are deactivated, or removed, for all intents and purposes.

Now for washing cars, if you are a mobile detailer, DI is the way to go for 99% of them. There are always a few that prefer RO but on the whole, DI is better.

If you have a shop, I would go with RO, mainly because it has a large up front cost to set it up, but you own the equipment, and you will not need monthly service.

AZScooter

[Aurora40]

Originally posted by AZScooter
Disitlled water is actually done through a distillation process. That means the water is actually boiled and the steam is recaptured and chilled to make it water. This leaves all of the metal particles behind in the hot tank and ideally leaves pure water behind. This is probably the most ponderous method to purify water. It is also probably the least pure method of the three, and the most ponderous for our uses.

Why would distilled water be the least pure method? Distillation removes absolutely everything from water, not just those things that make it conductive. It is a very simple, yet expensive and slow process, which is likely why there is very little industrial use for it.

[Aurora40]

Originally posted by AZScooter
Pure water is acidic.

I don't mean to sound like a jerk, but this is utterly and absolutely false. In fact, it's false by the very definition of pH.

DI water tends to be non-neutral because the filters tend to only remove one type of ion from the water, leaving it unbalanced. I don't know that much about DI filters to go into detail, but basically if you pulled out all the cations and left all the anions or vice-versa, you'd be left with water with a non-neutral pH. I think most larger scale DI systems have some post-processing of the water to balance out the pH.

Distilled water will be pH neutral without any need for adding or buffering it.