Dish soaps and car wash products use the same surfactant packages claim

[KC's]

Re: Dish soaps and car wash products use the same surfactant packages claim

Dish detergent is highly effective at stripping grease, and if it strips grease it will strip wax. A quality car wash shampoo won't strip wax. That alone should tell you which product you want to use to wash your car.

Now, we've said this before and we'll say it again - using dish detergent to wash your car is not going to destroy your paint, plastic, vinyl, rubber, etc if you follow each wash with a full compliment of wax, vinyl and rubber dressing, etc. We've got a forum member who has basically proven this since his father used nothing but dish soap on his car, but otherwise babied the car with very regular surface treatments.

But the big problem is for the "average" consumer who never does anything more than wash the car - they can't be bothered with any of the "details' of detailing and they won't regularly apply a dressing to the trim, vinyl, etc. Then they wonder why all that trim has turned white in a couple of years. We've seen these cars come into our garage where the plastic cowl is almost white, and it comes from neglect. And neglect isn't just not dressing it, it's using products that can speed up the drying out of the material.

People think of things like vinyl, leather, paint, etc to be "dry" but in truth they aren't. Unless you let them "dry out". Ever seen a piece of leather that's really "dried out"? Looks a bit different than the seats in your new car, doesn't it? Ever worked on really dried out paint? It pulls the lubricants right out of the paint cleaner or compound you're working on and the product gums up on the surface. Ever try to apply a pure polish to a dried up gel coat? The gel coat color is instantly revitalized, but the pure polish is just soaked up by the finish.

Paint, and especially gel coat, is actually quite porous and it will take in a bit of these oils. Over time, it can, will and does dry out if not taken care of. There is no doubt that a modern clear coat is far more durable and resilient than earlier single stage lacquer paints, but they are not impervious to the ravages of time and the environment.

We're huge fans of simply following a "best practices" philosophy when taking car of your car, so we'll finish this the same way we started: Dish detergent is highly effective at stripping grease, and if it strips grease it will strip wax. A quality car wash shampoo won't strip wax. That alone should tell you which product you want to use to wash your car.

thank you! for it says
it always takes a cobbler to know his tools

[KC's]

Re: Dish soaps and car wash products use the same surfactant packages claim

more reply from the Dr Chemist You hit the nail on the head "advertise." Depends what sort of sealants they use. Happy to back this up with data from chemical manufacturers too (ie Wacker, highly regarded German manufacturer of silicones). You have traditional waxes, and numerous types of silicones. The silicones are the ones that can be designed as detergent resistant. Particularly the "reactive-type" amino-functional silicones. These bond with the surface of your paint and then cross-link with each other too. High detergent resistance! With respect to car soaps vs dish soaps: they use a very similar surfactant package and therefore will clean in a very similar manner. If your sealant is detergent resistant then it'll resist dish soap AND car soap. If it's not, then either one will strip it.

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more reply Let's kill this myth too: sink detergents are (or at least SHOULD BE) neutral, whereas powder for your dishwashing machine is alkaline. It's a matter of how you get a clean; there is more than one way to skin (clean) a cat. One can use alkalinity to 'cut' fats/proteins/etc down (actually, it has a slightly diff effect on proteins, regarding the isoelectric point and increasing solubility, but that doesn't matter) OR one can use surfactants to 'pick up' the soils and solubilise them in water. Look up Micelle on wikipedia; the second graphic should help visualise this. Knowing this, and also that you can't put foam-producing surfactants into a closed container with high mechanical action (washing machines, both dish and laundry, and also CIP systems used in the Food & Beverage industry) they needed another solution: surfactants. High alkalinity, which works fantastically, also has the down-side that it works fantastically on flesh... hence a neutral pH (and a surfactant package to compensate) in dish soaps. All the sink detergents that I ever designed had a neutral pH, for one simple reason: You're putting your hands into it!!!

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last Is it? I've never seen that documented! If you have credible links, then I'd be happy to read them for you and give an opinion. There is always more that I don't know about I know it's a potential irritant - but that's the nature of surfactants - due to the fact that it picks up the oils on your skin and 'dries' it out. Any time I've heard of a 'gentle' cleaner for your skin, it'll have a standard surfactant like SLES (sodium laureth sulphate) coupled with a moisturiser or humectant (lanolin, glycerine, etc). Dangerous? If it was "documented" to be dangerous, then it wouldn't be used frequently in toothpaste, would it? Chemicals need to be GRAS-listed for that (Generally Recognised As Safe). This is merely my speculation though, so please do send through what you know and I'd be more than happy to read it! The other thing I've noticed on the forum is that there appears to be a lot of fear regarding your clear coat. You (the forum, in general) give it far less credit than it deserves. The worst thing for your paint-work, aside for contaminants, is UV-radiation. Yep, sunlight. Ever seen a plastic lawn chair fade over time? A vinyl dash start to crack? UV degradation, plain and simple. If I was any good at drawing diagrams with the PC I'd do up an explanation for how the paintwork fades, due to UV degradation, which then causes light scattering - and then how a polish works by abrading your clear coat slightly. (Interestingly enough, it's the same reason that milk is white - 100% scattered light) This aside, there is a very good reason we've been using acrylic resins for protective coatings for our cars - they're tough! A detergent is NEVER going to destroy it. Pollution and sunlight will chew through it though. My only concern with mild alkalinity is cutting through the wax coating.

from another forumer

Finally, I have scientific data that proves Dawn does not dry out your seals/harm paint

I've always been able to tell who the "Kool-Aid" drinkers were whenever this subject has been brought up in the past

i am not sure of this ......but it makes no sense

[PhantomMagician]

Re: Dish soaps and car wash products use the same surfactant packages claim

Dish soap strip wax for sure, and meg's prod don't
i have try it my self

i use two of my foam app pads, full of thick wax on both of them and let them dry for 2 days ( forgot to clean it ^^ )...

then i put them in two bucket of water, one of them contain Gold class shampoo, and the other contain dish soap...

the app pad in "dish soap bucket" clean my app pad in 15 minutes
and the other app pad in "GC shampoo bucket" still full of wax even after i leave it in the water for half days, try to use my hand to remove the wax, but still nothing happen...well, the dust is gone but the wax still there ...