Carpokes

Anyone use a rinseless car wash method? My method is just to let the car become a dirt ball....

I have been using a foam cannon for the wash and a pressure washer to rinse and a leaf blower to dry, with a quick towel. Any benefit to doing this with a rinseless method?

grazie

.......uh, nope! 30+ years in the car business and I have chatted with so many people who think this might be the way to go, yet this negates the simple fact we drive on streets and pick up so much junk regardless of where we live. Most of us adhere to washing under the wheelwells and other areas underneath. That is not going to get done and where you live ( Florida ) you can fight salt and sand year round. Sure, many of us will lightly drag a California duster over our cars for a show, maybe use some Meguair's Instant detailer on occasion, but other than that, keep spraying water.

PS - Years ago I asked a custom painter we had on staff your exact question and his comment was unless it was unable to be moved ( like in a private collection or museum ) water was one the absolutely best way to get the grit that often is baked onto one's vehicle. I do like the air blow drying method as it often means only a few places need a bit of touch up --- often under the hood, inside the door jams , lift back, etc.

I use the rinseless car wash when it's just lightly dusty or I have bird droppings I want to remove. The key is using many towels and "rolling" them when you wipe off. It has its place for sure but as I get older I don't mind the dirty car as much (probably because it is black..). I do the same thing as you and have recently added spraying the car with a quick detailer when Im drying it. Having PPF helps also.

Mike
OPS

I do use Mothers Waterless wash and wax to keep the road film off the ppf. It works well for that purpose. I don't use it on cars without ppf though.

I'll confess up front that I'm a bit of a fanatic about keeping the black cars black. Same with the other cars too, of course.

The decision on a wash or not has to do with the dirt load and type, along with rinse water quality. If the car is just a little dusty, a quick pass with the Cali Duster, followed by quick detailer and microfiber towels, is usually enough before leaving the garage. I do the same thing when I get home, unless there was water included during that drive. Then the cover goes back on until the next drive.

Mineral levels in the water help determine how often the car gets a full wash. We have relatively low levels in our local water, and even then it depends on the source of the moment. River water or pumped well water here. On black especially, just a little mineral content is enough to cause them to crystalize out in every micro-scratch on the paint if the car isn't dried completely and done really fast. That means everywhere water touches including door jams, hood and hatch edges, sunroof well, lights, seams, rockers, glass, wheel wells and wheels, and some of the underbits.

At our previous home above L.A. I added a good softener, plus a second resin bed just for car rinse water. The water was pretty darn hard there, concentrated after the long journey in canals then reservoirs where high evaporation concentrated the minerals in tap water. A tablespoon of vinegar in the wash bucket goes a long way to helping solve the minerals in the bucket, plus does some good with some of what's plated out on the paint already. Then the demineralized rinse and a quick but thorough drying effort. Then the quick detailer and the cover.

We've had the good fortune to live in desert climates, and I avoid driving in the rain the few times it does happen. Rain water in itself is a blessing, but it grabs any dust that might be on the car, dissolves some of the minerals in the dust, and replates those on the paint as the water evaporates. Water spots are the most visible result, but in fact the whole car is one big water spot unless the minerals can be removed first. The bit of vinegar followed by the demineralized water rinse, plus a very complete drying effort, is the best method I've found so far.

The car is never washed in the sun, seldom washed outside unless it's a seriously cloudy and cool day. Or the sun is going down, it's cooling off, and the spike in RH will extend the dry time.

A good paint sealant is your friend, mostly for protecting the pain in case there are some deposits. But also to allow the water to slide off harmlessly. It must be maintained of course. I'm not a fan of most since they sort of fog the black a bit, but the protection more than offsets the impact on appearance, at least in my estimation. I haven't yet tried any of the ceramic or graphite nano sealants, since I still have plenty of sealant left in the bottle now.

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I like the Adams instant spray detailer better than the Meguiars I used to use. The paint sealant I use is a Meguiars synthetic. It works, and is very forgiving during application. We knew Barry Meguiar and his family socially when we were in SoCal, and I went to more than a few of the tech seminars his company hosted in Orange County. Meanwhile, Craig "the chemist" Burnett was a QC chemist at P&G when I was there, and I helped him land the 20+ year gig at Mothers in Huntington Beach when we closed the P&G factory in Long Beach in the late 1980's. It's a small world.

I don't use any rinseless wash products but I do Use Griot's Speed Shine at times for light garage dust. The lubricity of Speed Shine is quite amazing and is fine for that type of use if the product is sprayed on generously and used properly with clean, high quality micro fiber towels.

Spot uses such as cleaning bird droppings as mentioned by Maruscmn are also beneficial. Again, heavy spray of Speed Shine with a minute or so to soak and a careful, slow, very gentle rolling wipe as he described will do the job.

I am not a fan of any rinseless wash products and don't use them. If I am really am in need of a quick clean, I prefer a quick high-pressure wand wash from the multitude of those facilities that exist everywhere.

@dr bob
Thanks for the tip on vinegar...never thought of that for the car. I've used on shower heads for removing mineral deposits (we seem to have a lot in the water here in Tennessee), but didn't make the connection to washing my car.
My garage faces west so to avoid any sun load when I wash, its early morning before the house shadow disappears.

@blueline
I'm a big fan of Griot's Speed Shine as well.....used to use it on my friends racecar between sessions at the track s well.

I use washwaxall, plus a couple of their other products and I think it's great. But my car never gets wet, period - at least until some rocker rust and bad bondo issues are dealt with. So it never gets really dirty.
After cleaning the paint surface is smooth as waxed glass. I clean it just about every time I take it out.

ROB III wrote: Wed Mar 26, 2025 10:20 am @dr bob
Thanks for the tip on vinegar...never thought of that for the car. I've used on shower heads for removing mineral deposits (we seem to have a lot in the water here in Tennessee), but didn't make the connection to washing my car.
My garage faces west so to avoid any sun load when I wash, its early morning before the house shadow disappears.

The SoCal water we enjoyed had minerals measured in parts-per-part. The little bit of vinegar in the bucket seemed to offset some of those. Vs. a shower head soak in straight vinegar to remove more serious deposits. Most car wash detergents have some water-softeners as part of their emulsifiers ingredient package. My vinegar addition was just a little help for the extreme local conditions there. If you have seriously hard water, it might help you too.

Here on the eastern slopes of the Cascades, we don't need to steal water from far away places. If I look west out my office window, I could see the water supply as snow if those darn trees weren't in the way. Contaminants here are primarily calcium carbonate, and at very low concentration. I'm set up for a future water softener install, but in the almost dozen years here I haven't yet felt the need. I'm ready if there's some sudden spike in hardness.

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My most recent experiences with Tennessee water was more concerned with stuff that was being actively dumped into rivers upstream. Between unregulated waste from a no-say-anything munitions operation to leaching from coal ash ponds and dumps, I wouldn't dip a toe into any of the water flowing nearby where we were. It took a bit of effort to get boiler-quality water from that stuff, and our discharge flow was a lot cleaner and nicer than what flowed in from that river. Yet there were folks out fishing in that river and the lakes between dams. It's just a different regulatory world there.