Cost: £15.99
Date of Review: 9/2/2025
The Sales Pitch from Hydro:
HYDRO Snow is an indispensable product for car detailing, designed to effectively clean your car without leaving swirl marks. This foam cleaner is pH neutral and is formulated to linger on surfaces for longer periods of time. It is capable of removing traffic films and breaking down, loosening, and lifting grit and grime.
The pre-wash process is an essential part of car detailing, as it removes heavy, gritty particulate grime without making contact with the vehicle. HYDRO Snow works its way into hard to clean panel gaps and shuts to effectively pre-clean the unseen areas. Heavy contamination can easily cause abrasion and inflict defects when dragged around on paintwork or gloss plastics with your wash mitt. Therefore, removing these contaminants prior to your contact wash using HYDRO Shampoo is crucial.
HYDRO Snow can be used as a first stage pre-wash product, immediately after using a Pre or even mix with HYDRO Pre. It is safe to agitate such as window rubbers, badges, and grilles with a soft detailing brush. HYDRO Snow is designed to attack grime for the maximum possible dwell time and uses a specially-developed combination of cleaning agents and advanced surfactants to pull contamination off surfaces on a molecular level.
HYDRO Snow is safe for use on all exterior surfaces, including paintwork, wraps, plastics, rubber and glass. It is tough on grime but will not strip or degrade protection layers due to its pH neutral formulation. This makes it the ideal cleaning solution for every detail.
This product does not come with a spray top.
The special formula of this Pre means with correct dilution you can lift the thickest of grime, tar & anything else in your way. Inside and out, grime is gone leaving it safe to be wiped or washed away.
To maximise the number of washes you get out of the product while also providing a fantastic clean we recommend diluting Hydro Snow to a 6:1 water to snow ratio. Add the desired dilution level into a snow foam cannon and spray onto the vehicle. Apply full coverage to every panel to ensure dirt and grime is affected. Leave to dwell for a couple minutes until you start to see most the foam sliding off, jet wash off ensuring all snow is removed before proceeding with the next cleaning stage.
Source: https://hydrouk.co/collections/all/products/hydro-snow
What You Get:
One litre of product. The sales pitch says that this comes with a nozzle. When I purchased this as V2 Full Spray Bundle, the product doesn’t come with a nozzle as it’s meant to be sprayed on under pressure.
Product Description:
The product is designed to be a pre application to remove the dirt on the paint and run it off the surface. This would minimise dirt being moved over the surface of the paint while getting the contact wash.
This is a Ph neutral product which shouldn’t affect the previous waxes or coating on your vehicle.
This product can also be used a shampoo.
Instructions:
I mixed the product to the instructions on the bottle as a 6:1 dilution ratio. Spray on full coverage and “Leave to dwell for a couple minutes until you start to see most the foam sliding off, jet wash off ensuring all snow is removed before proceeding with the next cleaning stage”.
Testing Environment:
A cold day with no wind. I was to test this on two cars that I left to be really grubby with no car wash for six weeks or so.
Application:
That’s 857.1ml water to 142.9ml of product to make 1litre of product. This is being applied directly over the top of the Hydro ‘Pre’ product, review here, as recommended by Hydro themselves to give a really good pre washing step.
I used the V2 Hydro Spray bottle, review can be found here, as it was part of a bundle package. Unfortunately this bottle was faulty with no pressure being held and needed constant pumping in order to get the Snow to spray.
When pressure did manage to spray the ‘Snow’ product it wasn’t great and needed a couple of passes to get a good layer on the panels.
I left this for “a couple of minutes” as per the bottle’s instructions. Similar to Hydro’s ‘Pre’ product this didn’t appear to be doing much. The snow quickly thinned out and run of the panels. There was no running of thick foam.
Removing:
The whole point of my purchase of the bundle was for days like this where a product(s) could be applied, jet washed off and left with a clean car. The expectations was high based on the hype. The bundle says that applying the ‘Snow’ over the top of ‘Pre’ will remove the debris that was lifted by ‘Pre’ from the paint. The Hydro ‘Pre’ review can be found here.
Results:
After the second couple of minutes after the Pre and Snow dwell times, the jet washing showed a clean(ish) car when it was wet. But, after allowing both the cars to almost dry out the results were poor. There was virtually no difference between the Pre step and the removed Snow step. I theory the Pre step should have remove the worst and the Snow should have removed the rest of the debris or road film.
Before the car was allowed to dry out I used a couple of cotton pads to gently wipe the middle of the doors, not even the most dirty parts.
First was the grey Honda.
Secondly was the black Smart car.
I performed this test as on the Hydro promotional videos the guy used his finger to swipe the paint and showed a clean finger tip after the jet washing.
After seeing these results I ended up getting the buckets out and washing the cars properly. Far from the ten minutes dirty to clean that I was expecting as shown in the promo videos.
Rating: 1 out 10
There are even more products on the market for Snow Foam and there are some seriously good ones out there. This product didn’t make a dent in the road film on the cars paint. After the ‘Pre’ wash step with snow going over the top it should have been a breeze to see a difference. I couldn’t see any.
Ease of use: 8 – 10
Finish: 1 – 10
Conclusion:
The results and conclusion will be very similar to Pre as this was a two step process recommended by Hydro.
There are numerous Ph neutral Snow foams on the market, at similar price point and you can get much more for your money and are much more concentrated and can be diluted to much higher ratios giving much more product.
The sales pitch from Hydro says: “HYDRO Snow works its way into hard to clean panel gaps and shuts to effectively pre-clean the unseen areas.” That’s all well and good but I want to clean the areas I can see first. The other little quote: “pull contamination off surfaces on a molecular level”, i think it’s more like removes dirt on a miniscule level!
The snow foam can also be used as shampoo, It probably could, but considering there are some seriously good car shampoos out there that i really like, I also doubt that this will give a slick and smooth car wash compared to those. I could be wrong, but…..
At £16 for a litre it’s not the most expensive, but when you reduce the dilution up to 6:1 it’s fairly expensive verses total amount of product to use.
The cotton pads were filthy even after a couple of inches swipe not even a long swipe of the panel. After a ‘Pre’ soak step this ‘Snow’ foam should have pulled so much dirt and grime off the cars.
This review only gets a 1 out 10 due to the price point, the dilution ratio and lack of performance for removing dirt. In comparison, other products go on white and come of a grey colour, this product didn’t.
I don’t say this very often, but avoid this product (maybe the company?) and stick to the big names and established players in the market who have a good reputation.
Would I recommend it? NO
Would I buy it again? NEVER
