Spotless Washing?

It’s known that I’m a bit of car cleaning weekend warrior. Not just my Mustang at car shows, but my daily drivers too. There is a problem with wet washing which drives me mad, hard water. In my area of the country the water is notoriously bad. I will explain this in a bit more detail as I have been looking into various water filtration options, so this post and an article all in one. Hope its not to long.

​What Exactly Is ‘Hard Water’?

​In simple terms, hard water is the stuff that comes out of your mains water supply with a high mineral content. While rain water is naturally soft, as it percolates through the ground into our reservoirs and aquifers, it picks up bits of calcium, magnesium, and sometimes even chalk or limestone. By the time it travels through the pipes, get treated at water plants and add chlorine to that as well, it then travels down miles of pipes and reaches your household taps and your garden hose, it’s a mineral cocktail.

​While some minerals might be fine for you, they are the absolute nemesis for a clean car. When you spray that tap water onto your paintwork and let it dry, the H₂O (water) evaporates back into the air, but the minerals stay left behind. They can bond to the surface, creating those stubborn unsightly “water spots” or “limescale” marks that we all dread as car detailers, or even the weekend warriors who just want a shiny car. This is a reason why car detailers carry their own water around to make their life easier and avoid those water marks. Sometimes these marks looks like a small octopus has climbed over your car, the rings look exactly like that, but whitish. ​Most people think water spots are just an aesthetic nuisance, a bit of white dust that can be wiped away. ​The real danger lies in what happens when those minerals from the mains water are left to bake in the sun. Calcium and magnesium (also bird mess) are alkaline. When they sit on your clear coat (or your single-stage paint if you’re still running an original classic paint), they begin a process called etching. It’s like a tiny, slow-motion chemical burn taking place. The minerals actually eat into the surface of the paint. If you run your finger over a bad water spot, you might feel a slight indentation. That’s not dirt sitting on the paint; that’s the paint itself being damaged. Once it reaches that stage, no amount of washing or polishing will fix it.

​Damage Control: Removing Water Spots Without Killing Your Wax

​If you’ve found your pride and joy covered in these white rings, you need to be careful before diving into removal. Most people reach for household remedies, but if you’ve spent all Saturday applying a high-quality carnauba wax or a high-tech sealant, the wrong “fix” will strip that protection off in seconds.

​1. The Chemical Route – The Professional Way

​Before you start rubbing the paint, try a dedicated Water Spot Remover. Products like CarPro Spotless, Gtechniq W9, Chemical Guys Heavy Duty Water Spot Remover Gyeon Q2M water spot remover etc. are all specifically formulated with mild acids that break down the bond between the mineral and the paint while being as gentle as possible on the underlying surface.

​2. The Vinegar Dilemma

​A 50/50 mix of white vinegar and distilled water is the classic “old school” fix. The acetic acid in the vinegar is great at dissolving calcium.

​The Catch: Vinegar is an acid. While it’s great for the spots, it is brutal on car wax. If you use vinegar to clean your spots, you are effectively stripping away your wax protection. It leaves the paint naked as such and vulnerable to the next lot of hard water or UV rays. If you do use this method, you really should re-wax the area immediately.

​The “No-Go” List: Chemicals That Destroy the protection of your wax and sealants while fighting hard water, avoid these like the plague:

​All-Purpose Cleaners (APC) & Degreasers: Many people use these to “boost” their wash. Don’t. High-alkaline cleaners are designed to break down oils and waxes. They will leave your sealant patchy and ineffective.

​Dish Soap (e.g., Fairy Liquid or Dawn Ultra etc.): These are an ultimate sin, yes they clean, but often have elements of salt as a stabilizer. We know what salt can do cars – rust! Dish soap is designed to strip grease from pans, it will strip every bit of wax off your car, leaving the paint dry and prone to more severe water etching. Addition of salt that could be left behind, you are making things worse.

​Bleach-Based Cleaners: Never let anything containing bleach near your car. It will dry out your rubber trim and chemically attack the clear coat.

​Aggressive Household Limescale Removers: Products meant for your bathroom tiles are far too acidic. They won’t just remove the water spots; they can stain the paint and permanently dull the finish.

​Alcohol-Heavy Sprays: While Isopropyl Alcohol (IPA) is great for prep, using it as a “quick fix” for water spots, it will also instantly dissolve any wax or polymer sealant you have on the car. Good for starting from scratch if you want to rewax your car to remove old tired layers of wax or sealants.

Abrasive Pads: Dish scouring pads or bathroom cleaning pads, you know the sort with the sponge and a layer of plastic nylon to get seriously aggressive with stubborn cleaning jobs. They will destroy your paint and can even lead to having a respray, DON’T do it. Polishing pads used by professionals are virtually always foam, sometimes lambs wool for deep cutting or heavy paint correction. I don’t need to mention steel wool pads either do I? That is obviously, down to bare metal stuff.

All of this now leads into what I’ve just bought to save me time and effort to remove water spots; ‘Prevention is better than correction’. I have been looking into the ‘Spotless’ washing systems. This is treatment of the water that you put on your cars which will stop the water spots appearing in the first place. My purchased was a Spotless water system by ‘SpotBye’ and I’ve used it to create a review. I have created that page here, or click the link below for the complete setup guide, and a review of the results. Spoiler alert, it’s a game changer!

https://onemanandhismustang.com/spotbye-water-deioniser-system/

​If like me you’re stuck with hard water from the tap, you have to change your strategy. You can’t really just drench the whole car and then dry it at the end, well you could, but it won’t be a great finish. This is especially true on my black cars that shows the world and his mate for any marks what so ever. Try working smarter, not harder with a couple of tips from me:

​The Sectional Wash: Work on one panel at a time. Wash the roof, rinse it with the hose, and dry it immediately. This prevents the tap water from sitting long enough to evaporate and leave minerals behind. Move onto the hood, then the fenders and doors etc. Work your way down the car, the dirtiest part of the car is always lower down.

​The “Sheet” rinse: Take the nozzle off the hose. Let a steady, gentle stream of tap water flow over the panels. This “sheeting” effect leaves much less water on the car than a high-pressure spray which will leave droplets on the surface of the paint.

​Drying Aids: (A useful process I often use). While the car is wet, spray a product like Chemical Guys After Wash, Gyeon Q2M WetCoat, Meguiar’s Hybrid Ceramic Wax, Dat Wax Hydrophobic Protective Sealant or a quick detailer etc. These products lubricate the surface and help neutralise the minerals, making them much easier to wipe away before they can bond or dry out on your paint.

​Use a good quality microfibre cloth: A plush “twisted loop” drying towel is essential like Chemical Guys Woolly Mammoth or Slim’s Drying Towel. These towels are designed to pull the moisture and the minerals from the surface of the paint in a single pass rather than dragging them across the surface.

My new setup:

​There are multiple ways to soften the water, that will save you time and effort in the long run. There are canister style, an inline tube, wall mounted, dual filters all the way up to the professional pumped options.

Before I show you the setup and use, this is NOT a sponsored post, the product was purchased with my own hard earned money. I have been trying to talk myself into this for a couple of years now. As I now have two black daily driver cars, this turned out to be a quick discussion and I didn’t put up much of an argument with myself after struggling to keep the cars presentable. I did my research and I bought ‘SpotBye’ canister system. Depending on your needs this may not be for you, but from what I have seen, its a great purchase.

These next few steps shows a quick setup guide for the equipment. The FULL setup details and downloadable manuals are in the link here or the link above.

SpotBye is a basically De-ionising Resin vessel. It’s a cylinder that connects inline with your hose. They remove 100% of the minerals.

The setup was quite simple, although the instructions are dire to be honest. After unpacking you need to add a resin into the canister carefully so the resin doesn’t get into the centre tube. The centre tube which passes the treated water out the canister is removable. Open the vacuum packet resin packet (5ltr) and carefully fill the canister, this is the media that filters the water. SpotBye does supply a rubber cap to prevent the resin going into the tube.

Screw the cap on and attach the standard size fittings for your hose.

The supplied water testing tool shows just how bad our water is. The classification level for hard water is anything over 120 ppm (parts per million). From my tap drinking water tap it was 309ppm!!

Attach the garden hose (yellow) to the ‘In’ and another shorter hose to the ‘Out’ fitting (green) for the water spray attachment you want to use. Allow the water to run a couple of minutes to flush the hoses through and get the resin working. The reading after a couple of minutes was astounding, 20ppm in this picture, but even went down to 18ppm. However, it’s noted that the filtration should be 0ppm according to SpotBye. But, an improvement of 96% was good enough for me. The green hose was all I have left which is sometimes use for syphoning a water feature. A new one is on order as I write this up.

I deliberately left my car to get dirty (such is the sacrifice I make for these reviews)! It was bad as there has been some ‘Sahara’ sand which was mixed in with the UK’s famous rain which leaves this nasty mess which looks even worse on my black cars.

Washing the car was a breeze, even on a warm day in direct sunlight and on a hot car, all of which are big no-no’s by the way for cleaning a car. There was copious amounts of suds from the car shampoo which lasted a long time on the car, something I haven’t had before, to this degree anyway.

With the car cleaned it was rinsed of and again deliberately not dried to see what happens if the dreaded water spots showed up. There was some light sheeting marks which dried of wit h a drying towel without any effort.

The pic below left of the door mirror shows what I mean, the rinsing ran of the car instead of sitting on the panel on the right pic.

The image here is dotted to show where I half dried the door in the sun.

Once dried there was no water marks even in this extreme scenario of hot weather, hot panels and in direct sunlight. From the image below in the shadow on the left there is no water marks. The white bits you can see is in fact the paint pearl effect glinting in the sun, you can also see the pink, green, blue, red and yellows of the pearl paint. The phone was having trouble to trying to focus but settled on the reflection of the fence.

With the car dried the car was literally ‘spotless’ as this type of washing technique is referred to. I was also interested to see what it would be like after a quick detailing. Why? Just because I could. The results were even better than when I picked the car up from the showroom.

Here are some close ups of the paint with no water marks, the bottom right is the reflection of the house taken on the hood looking forwards, which is why it looks upside down!

To get a great finish the paint needs to be smooth to give a uniform reflection of light. Having no contaminates on the surface goes a long way to help with the desired reflective gloss. All of this comes at a cost though, to keep the water pure as it can be the resin which decontaminates the water needs to be replaced, around £35 for 5ltr which is what my canister holds. The harder the water the quicker the resin will need to be replaced. The recommended output is 520gallons at 200ppm. The fact that the car wash literally took half the time and was so much easier that cost is worth it to me.

​At the end of the day we spend a lot of money on fancy shampoos and waxes to keep our cars looking their best. It seems a bit mad to ruin all that hard work by drenching the car in liquid limestone from the garden hose.

I hope that gives a little insight to the finer points of detailing. Yes its over kill for some, but saving time back for myself and saving physical effort in order to get that good result is worth the small amount of money per car wash. I even save on not having to by products to correct a problem. Buying a few bottles of products to overcome these problems would outweigh the cost of the system I just bought.