Quote:
Originally Posted by 5pacey
Hose water loosens those particles normally and washes them off without actually pressing into the clear coat therefore minimizing scratching.
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Experience is a great teacher! Here's where you're maybe missing stuff which, once you see it yourself, it'll make sense ...
(a.) Yes, if your car is really dirty you need to spray it off
By "really dirty" I mean you can see hunks of mud or dirt stuck on the car. In that case there's no getting around it, you gotta spray those big hunks off. That said, that's a rarity for most people, even in snow states ... for most people, their car has a layer of oils & dirt that water won't spray off. This is the stuff you see as a dirt film, but usually few individual grains since if your eye can see them they're heavy enough to fall off. It's that oil/dirt film with its microscopic particles that causes the spiderwebs. So if water spray won't get it off, what does?
(b.) It's removing the soap that does the cleaning
Why? Well it's the mechanism that makes soap work in the first place: the tails of the soap molecules
are repelled by water and attracted to oils, which attracts dirt. The tails cluster together to form micelles which are the structures that trap the dirt and oils. Thus to do the cleaning, you only need enough water to repel the soap, form the micelles, which attract the dirt & oils and trap it. Said differently, it ain't the water you care most about, it's the soap.
Ok, so if the soap is now on the car's dirt film trapping the dirt & oil, just spray it off and done right? Well no.
Which brings us to the crux of the problem: Yes, the micelles are negatively charged and soluble in water, so they repel each other and latch onto that grease, dirt & oil ... but if that bond is weaker than the dirt's bond to your paint (and it mostly is or there wouldn't be a film in the first place) then the water will either just wash over the soap/dirt combo OR break the soap's bond with dirt. Either way, you've left the dirt in place.
So to solve the problem, we need something to grab BOTH the water AND the soap/dirt ... in a 2 bucket method that something is a wash mitt. If any of this is making sense, then you're seeing why using that mitt over & over from a 2nd bucket of rinse water is a bad idea: that bucket is full of micelles packed with dirt a few of which stick to the mitt and get back onto to the car causing spider-webbing.
Fuck. So what do we do?
(c.) Plastics.
Enter the genius of microfiber. Without going into the specifics, MF is GRRR8 at breaking that dirt/paint bond AND soaking up that water/soap/dirt mixture. This is why if you're using distilled water - which has maximum capacity to dissolve stuff - with soap and doing one wipe you're leveraging the power of MF, distilled water, and soap all in one go. The MF is like a velcro for soap/dirt, releasing it from the car and attaching it to the MF.
So, as long as you're gentle,
AND you routinely maintain your car
AND you've used a paint protectant like ceramic or graphene or any LSP or wax (all of which repel dirt and/or create a weak bond with it),
the waterless wash should be really easy & really effective while creating minimal spider webs ... certainly equal or less than a mitt wash.
And finally, however you do it, there's no getting around it: PPF, ceramic, whatever, you still gotta do this, i.e., wash your car if you want it to look nice. So you either pay a LOT for PPF and then a LOT for someone to do it (who for sure cares less about your car than you) ... or you pay a little for you to do it.
or you just skip the whole thing and roll in a dirt wagon.