Chemicals Used For Cleaning Cars

Whether you are an amateur cleaning your own car or a professional detailing a dozen cars a day, you ought to be well acquainted with the chemicals used in the industry, because all chemicals are perilous if misused.

However, safety is just part of the reason for getting to know the chemicals used for cleaning cars, you also have to know if someone is trying to sell you liquids that will or merely cannot do the job.

There are a great deal of charlatans in any line of business and a fool and his money are soon parted. Knowing the chemicals used for detailing cars will help you avoid being cheated by suppliers.

For example, you will frequently hear salesmen say that you can wash the inside of a car using the liquid from only one bottle.

This is simply not the case, especially if you have various fabrics inside the car like plastic door linings, cloth carpets and leather upholstery. It is just not possible to detail all these different fabrics well with just one fluid.

Surfactants are clever types of soap-like substances and are made up of different ingredients, a bit like combined shampoo and conditioner for humans. These surfactant molecules consist of two kinds a hydrophile and a hydrophobe. The hydrophobe is attracted to dirt and it tries to break it down, whilst the hydrophile envelopes the dirt so that it can be borne away.

The most common solvent known to man is water, but it has only a limited effect on grease, so in the case of grease, manufacturers turn to butyl and dilemonene, which is extracted from lemon and orange peel. These solvents are costly, but they are fairly harmless and can be used on several surfaces.

Other fats, such as sweat, can be washed away using animal fats that have been treated with a saponifier, which is usually a powerful alkaline. This does not sound very pleasant, but we have all used soap manufactured from animal fats.

The animal fat mixes with the human fat (say sweat) and they dissolve into one another. The alkaline then breaks them down so that they can get borne away. You do this each day when you wash or take a shower.

The science of cleaning is quite a complex one once you start looking into it, but why some products are just good for one type of job only becomes evident once you do study it.

However, when you do find out what is really going on and where the chemicals have come from, a great deal of people wish that they had not taken the time to go into the issue.

In summary, and to keep it simple (more for my benefit than for yours, I assure you) endeavour to treat like with like. Be suspicious of using a chemical for other than its specified purpose without having conducted trials on out-of-sight patches. Endeavour to use petroleum based cleaners on oil; alkaline cleaners on organic materials and acids on non-organic substances.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently concerned with auto interior detailing. If you want some tips on detailing cars go over to our site now at Detailing Car Interiors.