I Hate Water Spots!
You may have washed your car yourself, or accidentally parked next to a sprinkler, and noticed these very hard white circles on your paint, that don’t seem to come off no matter what you do. What causes these?
Here in Albuquerque and certainly other places, you are extremely lucky if you are fortunate enough to have soft water. Hence the massive bags of salt or other treatments sold around the city, which is great for your inside water and your hair. Unfortunately, most sprinkler systems are not hooked up to a softener.
Hard water can create serious spotting issues on paint, creating a huge challenge in paint correction. Not only does hard water directly affect the performance of car wash soap, if left to dry, it can etch into your paint. This is Permanent Damage, just like bird droppings or scratches. Calling an IDA trained and Certified detailing technician like Peter with Park’n’Shine is your best bet to restoring your car to its pristine shape.
How to avoid water spotting!
How your water is softened or purified can make a huge difference for you as you detail or wash your car. Here are four main ways to soften water, as well as different costs and advantages.
1 – Distillation
Essentially boiling the water into a gas and then condensing it back to liquid. All the solid ions stay behind in the original container and only water gets recovered as liquid. Distillation while fully purified is not cost effective, because of the energy and equipment required
2 – Water Softening
You Probably have a water softener or know someone who has. Potassium chloride or sodium chloride are common choices for softening water. You will get great results in the shower, and in areas with hard water you may wish to soften before using other methods of purification. Softened water can still leave spots on your car however.
3 – Reverse Osmosis
Pressurized, filtered water is pushed through a fine membrane. The ions remain on the outside of the membrane and only ions that are small enough can get through. Most ions get filtered out and result in purified water. Reverse osmosis has a relatively high up front cost, wastes some water and is not as high a purity as DI. But, it costs less to maintain and the water is fine for detailing.
4 – DE-ionization
Water is sent through a bottle with resin that attracts and holds all the ions. The pure water passes through and is collected on the other side of the bottle. De-ionization is a fairly easy set up and results in the highest purity but is much more expensive to run. In areas with very hard water, DI alone is completely cost prohibitive but can be combined with an initial RO process to get both cost efficiency and very high quality water.
The benefit of using pure water is that it allows our detergents to perform at their optimum level, which means we can use less chemicals. This is easier on the environment and on your car.
At Park N Shine, we use Reverse Osmosis for exceptional results.
We also Utilize a technique known as the Rinse-less Wash, Which we’ll describe in another article.
Source info from Dave Phillips – P&S Director of Operations and Chemist Extraordinaire
Sign up for the Deal