Great Advice for Cleaning Your Stang
 

Hey guys (and gals), I thought I would throw out a bit of information that some of you may know, but some may not.

Did you know that your water quality greatly affects how clean your car can get?

Water, as you know, is H20. But it is also loaded with contaminants. Many of these contaminants are dissolved. This means that they can NOT be filtered no matter how hard you try. Also, all municipal water sources have chlorine added to it. Do you know what chlorine does to a car finnish? It is a strong oxidizer...think about it.

These harmful contaminents can be removed a few different ways. If you rinse your car with high purity water, you will NOT get any water spots even if it air dries. Your car will also get much cleaner and it will be a lot easier to dry (if your prefer to wipe it down).

Here are some options. Purchase a Reverse Osmosis unit. An RO will remove about 97% of these unwanted contaminents. Then put the water in a garden sprayer, and use this water for your final rinse.

I have a $700 RO unit in my house (we use it for cooking and drinking), but I can get them for about $400.

Or, buy a few gallons of distilled water at the store and use the sprayer concept. This cost only a few bucks and will be enough to convince you. You will not be dissapointed.

Also, "Mr. Clean" makes a cool car cleaning device ($19 at WalMart). It comes with soap too. The machine has a demin cartridge that you use for the final rinse. You will get three washes or so out of each one. With this unit, you don't need a sprayer as it uses garden hose presure. I have used this thing and it really works!!! The down side is that you need to keep purchasing cartridges.

I am a water treatment consultant and have been working in the industry for 15 years. This concept is a no-brainer and many hi-tech industries have been using high purity rinse water for years. I personally involved with the design of the water rinse system used on the first DVD's nearly 10 years ago for Time Warner and they still use it today.

I have tested my water for contaminents many times and here is what I have found:

My water (well): TDS - 325 ppm
RO Water: TDS - 18 ppm
Mr. Clean Demin: TDS - 3.2 ppm

If you have exceptionally good quality water, you will not see as much of a difference as with bad water.

Hope this was not too boring,

Blake

Interesting....

I think I will try the store distilled water first.

I think a still would be cheaper than a RO unit. Especially if you did not need high on demand volume

Our tap water quality here is not too good from a suspended or dissolved solids point of view and it definitely will leave spots if it dries. That is why the micro fiber towels are such an improvement for me. If I dry with them I get absolutely no spots.

The RO unit is really ONLY a viable option if you are interested in improving your drinking water too. The payback, besides better, healthier water, is that you DO NOT need to buy bottled water for your house. You can get rid of your water cooler if you have one of these. The RO unit will make your water better than ANYTHING you can buy with the exception of Aqufina. Aquafina (a Pepsi product) is processed using an RO.

I also tried the "Mr. Clean" unit ($19 wal-mart) but I kept the receipt cause I'm tired of buying gimmicks and getting ripped. I figured it be good to use late in the afternoon when I don't feel like drying the car. Anyhow:

Positives-
*No Drying-
*Ease of Use- (Soap dispenser built in)

Negatives-
*Recommended not to use other Soaps ("mr.clean"only)
*Filtered water trickles and you have to continuously spray the car till "contaminated" water is washed away
*would take the same amount of time to dry by hand!
*replacement filter cartridges are around $5 (initial cartridge does 3 washes....but the replacements do more)

Verdict-
Buy a silicone water blade (won't scratch) for your car.

I used my Meguires car wash in mine. Worked fine.

The flow rate of the demineralized water spray will depend on your water quality. I was able to rinse my Mustang in less than a minute.

A water blade will scratch your car. Well, not the blade itself but any tiny particle on the paint will be dragged across the paint by the blade when you're drying. The blade pushes water off of the surface and will do the same with dirt, dust, and other particles....it will push them across the surface. With a towel, there is a nap for the particles to recede into, not so with the blade.

Blake is correct, I have a Water Softner for my whole house and it is great. I will never go back to HARD water........Neverrrrrrrr.

Yes, a water softener is a huge improvement!

A softener, however, simply exchanges "unwanted" ions for better ones. The softener removes hardness (calcium and magnesium) and replaces it with sodium. The process is called ion exchange. The sodium forms less scale and depsoits, but when it evaporates to dryness, it still leaves behind the sodium.

By going to even better water quality for your final rinse, the car will get even cleaner! because you have softwater already, the "Mr. Clean" final rinse water (deionized) will work perfectly. Sodium is one of the most soluable substances on earth and the demin spray from the Mr. Clean system will easily wash away the water from your softener. Also, you will get much more than the three rinses from the demineralizer with softwater. Probably more like 5 - 8.

The girlfriend gives Evian to cats so I guess she can't complain when I pour it on the stang. :D

Seriously though, I saw the Mr. clean product on late night T.V. and because of that I was a little skeptical. But since you guys are backing it, I'll give it a try. (Gotta save the Evian for the cats!)

Jason:

Try it and let me know what you think. Or, if you have a garden sprayer, clean it out real good first, and then dump a few gallons of distilled water in it. Pump it up and spray your car off. You will get the same affect before investing $20 in Mr. Clean.