| ▲ | SoftTalker a day ago |
| Or a garden hose, bucket of soapy water, and a sponge. At least if you have a house with a garden hose. Many apartment complexes offer the amenity of an area for washing cars though. |
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| ▲ | somerandomqaguy a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| Most Canadian cities prohibit washing anything (car, bike, etc) outside with soap unless you're capturing the runoff. Even biodegradable soaps. Car wash is the only legal way to use soap, for better or worse. |
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| ▲ | SoftTalker a day ago | parent [-] | | > unless you're capturing the runoff And doing what with it, exactly? | | |
| ▲ | yayachiken 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not sure if it's the same in Canada, but where I am from the problem is the oil (lubricant and fuel) from the car and at car washes the runoff gets treated by letting it go through an oil trap. The trapped oil gets disposed of separately, the treated oil-free water goes to the sewer. | |
| ▲ | somerandomqaguy a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Hell if I know. AFAIK the regulations were put into place to prevent untreated water from going into storm drains and into the water system, so presumably the cities are fine if you pour it down into the bathtub drain and let it go to the waste water treatment plants. | | |
| ▲ | hgomersall 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | I appreciate the sentiment, but is the gunk on the car not the gunk that would have washed down the drains in the first place? Clearly there are plenty of nasty cleaning agents, but one supposes that safe ones might be used (I actually spent a while considering exactly this, and it's possible but not super easy getting an environmentally friendly car cleaner). I guess the issue is it's hard to tell from mere drive-by observation what cleaner is being used. | | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | I use Dawn dish soap in hot water. No need for harsh or expensive car wash detergents. |
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| ▲ | c22 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | You can allow the liquid to evaporate off in an evaporation pond, or combine it with an absorbent gel. Then the solids can be put in trash. | | |
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| ▲ | linkregister a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Car washes are an order of magnitude more water efficient (enforced by state agencies) than individual home car washing. |
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| ▲ | SoftTalker a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah that could be a concern depending where you live. Where I live, water is cheap and abundant. And I've never measured, but I would guess I use maybe 10 gallons to wash a car. 2 gallons in the bucket, and just a light wetting followed by soapy sponge and then a rinse, using a nozzle to create a high velocity spray. The water doesn't run at all unless I'm spraying it on the car. | | |
| ▲ | ssl-3 a day ago | parent [-] | | Water is cheap and abundant where I live, too. If we have a problem with water in any normal year, it is usually that we have to deal with a surplus of it. (We put drainage tiles under our farm fields to get rid of excess water and generally don't even bother with irrigation systems at all.) But car washes are interesting systems and one of the things that makes them interesting is that the water they use is (often) recycled. The same water gets reclaimed and re-used to wash cars over and over again. I didn't look very deep at all, but one car wash chain suggests[1] a reclamation rate of 70%. Not perfect, but way better than 0. [1]: https://www.tsunamiexpress.com/our-washes/ |
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| ▲ | psidebot a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You can probably match that efficiency at home by using an electric pressure washer. Mine does 1.2 GPM, which means an entire car wash is only a few gallons. | |
| ▲ | encrypted_bird a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's surprising. I once tried an automated car wash just to see what all the hullabaloo was about and I think the rain actually does a better job. Worst $5 I've ever spent... | |
| ▲ | bityard a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes. In the same way that dishwashers are an order of magnitude more water-efficient than washing by hand. (But consume a kilowatt of electricity heating the water and running the pump, which is the part that everyone always leaves out.) | | |
| ▲ | xp84 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | You heat the water when you wash dishes by hand too, don't you? It's not very hygenic to do dishes with just cold water. Given that by hand you use much more hot water than the dishwasher would, you're using more electricity (or gas). Since a little pump doesn't use much at all, it's mainly just the drying heat that matters. Though nobody is forced to use the drying cycle - if one enjoys drying dishes by hand, they can still use the dishwasher to do the washing. | | |
| ▲ | fahrvrgnugen a day ago | parent | next [-] | | In my house you don't heat the water but it's been sitting in a metal water tank at equitorial latitude for hours so is generally quite warm for evening dishes. Is it safe? Not for a restaurant where the temps need to get to parasite killing temps to pass muster.. but if I had to guess, the odds of getting killed by a bad-tempered cow outweigh it by 10x. | |
| ▲ | defrost a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're assuming an absence of solar hot water heaters - the world isn't homogenous. eg. Our household conserves water (we track every litre we bring up to the tanks and filter) and we don't have a dishwasher - hot water is heated by the sun and run-off goes to the grey water tank for the garden. | | |
| ▲ | xp84 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | No I'm not. I don't care how you heat your water. I'm saying you (should) heat it either way, and you use more of it when hand-washing so if you do pay to heat it, you pay more by handwashing. And in your case, you use more water because you hand-wash, than you would if you used a dishwasher. You use slightly less energy because of the pump but also a lot more of your time, so... obviously how you relatively value those different things is up to you. |
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| ▲ | BeetleB a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | When my water heating was electric, switching to a dishwasher consistently led to lower electric bills compared to a year prior (confirmed for 12 whole months). You save water and electricity. | | |
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| ▲ | runamuck a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I live next to a college. The Sororities will hold car washes. Of course, they ask us to get out of the car first, so that Cheerleading movie w/ Kristen Dundst lied. :-) |
