Cost: £89.99

Date of Review: 

The Sales Pitch from a retailer on Amazon:

Source: Amazon

What You Get:

Product Description from SpotBye:

Portable Spotbye Spotless Water Cleaning System for Caravans, Motorhomes, Cars, Windows and Boats: Recommend to have a telescopic water fed pole or our telescopic water fed pole to connect to the spotbye system. Spotbye is a portable tank system filled with De-ionising resin which produces purified water. Purified water is completely free from any impurities (such as calcium, magnesium and sodium) and dries completely clear and streak free which is ideal when cleaning windows, cars, boats, caravans and motorhomes. When you have finished cleaning your caravan or motorhome or windows, simply rinse down/brush the surfaces and leave with no need to dry/chamois creating a spotless finish. The portable spotbye system inlet can connect to an outdoor water hose/tap and outlet to our 18ft water fed pole cleaning brush or hosepipe. The main benefit using purified water to clean your car, boat, caravan or motorhome is that when rinsed down with pure water, there will be no need to dry the surfaces with a cloth/chamois saving you time and effort. Benefits include: Car Cleaning. Window Cleaning using our telescopic water fed pole (2-3 storeys high). Solar Panel Cleaning. Conservatory Cleaning. Soffit, Fascia, Cladding and External Guttering Cleaning. Static Caravan Cleaning. Motorhome Cleaning Caravan Cleaning System includes the following: Resin Vessel (5 litre capacity) 5 litre de-ionising resin (to reduce TDS to 0ppm for pure water cleaning) TDS Meter (to measure purity of water) Battery Included CR2032 Hozelock connections on resin vessel to connect to hosepipe and water fed pole. Portable Spotless Water Cleaning for Caravans/motorhome Recommend purchasing our 18ft telescopic water fed pole with can connect to our spotbye purified water system for efficient cleaning.

Why did I want a spotless water system?

The area where I live is notorious for the hard water and leave bad water spots on the cars especially noticeable on black. As I’m getting annoyed with this I decided to go for a spotless water method and this system seems to have good reviews, I will give mine once I start to use it. The two images below shows the type of water marks I get, and the difference of a half cleaned windscreen.

It was driving me mad having to rush around and dry the car a panel at a time then having to clean any water spots off after that taking a lot of time which should be a simple wash job.

Instructions:

Terrible! I have uploaded a PDF for it here but it’s not worth the download. The little leaflet covers all the options of the systems they produce, so I have only scanned the relevant pages here.

I have created a walkthrough on how to assemble the SpotBye which should be much easier to follow.

Unscrew the top of the canister and remove, there will be a attachment underneath.

Pull the plastic connecting tube away from top. Place the rubber cap on the end of the open part of the tube. This will prevent the resin from getting inside the tube and filter which could enter the jet wash.

Inside the canister there is a divot which which the same shape as the cone end of the attachment. The tube will stand on its own unsupported.

Take the vacuum sealed resin pouch and cut a corner off. Don’t make this cut to big as the resin will go everywhere when you try to tip it into the canister. Once the air rushes back into the canister

The resin doesn’t pour like a fluid or flow like a powder. The consistency is like a huge bag of slightly moist brown Demerara sugar.

I had a few attempts at getting this right and take your Time! I found to gently squeeze out of the cut corner a bit like an icing bag. The corner was cut a little larger in stages until I found a good size to squeeze out and not go over the side of the canister top. Every so often wiggle the pipe, (don’t lift it out) in order to settle the resin down. A few grains of resin were lost, but but no more than teaspoon at most with this method. I have seen posts on YouTube where they took out the attachment and poured the bag in, added water, stirred it then put the attachment back in. I don’t recommend this as the attachment may not seat fully back down to the bottom correctly.

Once the resin has been added, tap the canister down to settle the resin which will allow the cap to go back on easily. Remove the plastic cap from the top of the tube and re-attach the cap to the tube and screw the cap back on fully. Make sure the rubber O Ring is still in place.

With the cap back on securely we need to add the fittings. There is a clear ‘In’ and ‘Out’ marked on the top, but it doesn’t matter at this point as both fittings are the same. The supplied PTFE tape was used to wrap around the thread clockwise with the thread four times. If you wrap it the wrong way it will unravel and not seal correctly. Once the fitting was screwed into place I gave the fitting a nip up with an adjustable which need to open about 1 1/4″ to fit. Repeat for both sides

Add more PTFE tape to exposed thread which is for the Hozelock connection and screw into place.

The supplied handle is just slipped over the Hozelock fitting between the cannister fitting and the Hozelock. Just check that it will go over the Hozelock before tightening onto the canister fitting, there should be enough room with the ring and stitching.

The female fitting is just a the standard push fit without the water stop valve. I will change that straight through flow out on my setup to the water valve fitting. I have just fitted the supplied ones to show the completed setup.

TDS & EC Water Tester.

The supplied plastic water testing tool comes in a little windowed pouch with the instructions folded inside.

The fact that this company has supplied a tester which will prove the efficiency of their system gives me a real sense of confidence the setup is working and not just a gimmick. Hopefully I can wash and rinse the car without running around like an demented fly.

Instructions are again lacking especially when it comes to the battery fitting, as there is no reference to it! Not only that – I didn’t get a battery supplied with my package. Luckily I keep a supply of them as they are the common CR2032.

I have attached the scanned instructions here.

Remove the top of the tool insert the battery and place the cap back on. Note the alignment of the battery installation.

The tool can be turned on and ready to test. Take a sample of water, remove the bottom end of the tester to expose the two prongs and place the end of the tool into a sample of water between the two levels, a reading of 309 ppm (parts per million) which is pretty bad to be honest.

This reading will be the base line test that needs to be filtered by the SpotBye kit.

Testing Environment:

A sunny day with warm paintwork with little breeze and the odd cloud. This scenario goes against everything you should be doing. To wash a car properly it should be in a shaded area where the panels are cool to the touch, especially a black car as it retains heat.

My setup is a long garden hose to the canister, and then a shorter hose to the water gun attachment. This will bypass the jet washer that I normally use. The end of the garden hose has an aquastop were no water is let through until connected. Where the water gun is connected to the outlet hose it too has an aquastop. This will prevent a constant stream of water running when not required. The green hose is rather stiff and has been sitting around for a while which I use for syphoning a water feature, (note to self: get a better and longer hose).

The car has been dirty for three weeks collecting all sorts of dust and debris, it really bad for me as I never let my cars get to this stage, but in the interests of reviews I made the decision to leave it even though it was troubling my OCD and wanting to clean it.

Application:

The instructions were to let the water run for a couple of minutes which I did while rinsing out a couple of my car washing buckets before I actually use them. After a few minutes I took a sample into a jug and took a reading which measured 20 ppm. Another reading a bit later went down to 18 ppm.

That’s an improvement of around 96%!

I measured out the car shampoo and filled the buckets up with the newly filtering deionised water. Although the instructions does say to do a final rinse with the deionised water would be enough. I used it all the way through the process.

The car was given a jet from the hose to remove the worst of the loose grit and debris. It was evident at this early stage the water behaved differently and ran of the car better removing most of the surface debris.

There was noticeable loss of water pressure from the hose pipe and I was able to use the hose as I would expect.

The water suds were more plentiful in the bucket and lasted a lot longer. Applying the shampoo to the car the bubbles stayed longer. While rinsing the wash mitt in the clean bucket (two bucket method) the rinsing water also started to get some bubbles too.

After washing the door you can still see the bubbles are still on the hood. This is the longest I have ever seen suds on the car.

After the car was fully washed and clean, the car got a rinse with the water gun. The next step should be to dry the car.

Removing:

I deliberately didn’t dry the car and allowed it to air dry, just to temp fate. Normally this would have categorically given me the ‘octopus rings’ of calcium or water spots. The heat of the panel and the sun soon dried out the water which left some light white ‘sheeting’ marks on the paint, it was easiest to see on the door mirror here below. This is residue from the shampoo that had dried before the drying.

Below the door was rinsed and I stopped half way across where you can see some marks to the left of the dotted line. However, this was NOT a problem.

The right hand side of the door just had a drying towel to wipe over the panel – marks were gone with no effort and as simple as a wipe over, no rubbing. The drying towel was slightly dampened before use, which should always be the case and not applied dry to the paintwork. The moisture or dampness was enough to remove any water marks baked on by the sun and hot panels.

After the car was dried there was no sheeting marks or water spotting on the car, a real first for me. The car took half the time to wash, and I wasn’t running around like a mad thing trying to dry the car before the water spots appeared. Drips from the usual places like the door mirrors didn’t leave a stain on the car and just wiped away.

Normally the maintenance wash with the shampoo I use would have been fine as a wash and wax all in one providing a level of protection, job done. After drying the paint was slick and not rough to the touch, often the case with hard water deposits. In the shadow of the photo below you can see no water spotting or sheet marks.

The white spots are in fact the metallic pearl flecks in the paint reflecting in the sun, causing havoc with the phone’s focus attempts. You can see the other pearl colours, pink, green, blue, yellow etc.

The car was impressively clean I decided to try something else, a quick once over with my favourite quick detailer. I didn’t need to go over it again as the result was excellent. The extra quick detailing step was only done just because I could. (I’m not reviewing the quick detailer here, but it was effortless to apply and buff to shine.)

Results:

After the quick detailer the car looks better than when I picked it up from the showroom! No polishing, no hard work, washed in the sun and on a hot car.

The hood close up shows no water spots, along with the roof this is where you can normally see them first.

The image below left is a super close up of the top of the fender and part of the hood. The below right is not upside down, it was taken looking towards the front of the car and is the reflection of the house!

Undoubtedly, the quick detailer made the car’s pearl paint ‘pop’ even more. If there were spots, they would still have been seen on the paint unless a process to remove them which is super time consuming and sometimes a painful process.

Disconnecting & Storage:

The mistake I made was to disconnect the fitting to the canister without releasing the pressure. As I disconnected the hose to the inlet I was showered with water from back pressure. What should of happened was turn the water off and open the water gun to release the pressure. Only then disconnect the fittings.

With the hoses disconnected I could tip the excess water from the canister into a jug or three and use that to top up the washer jet bottles. Pointless tipping it away.

Rating:  10 out 10

This is just one of the many ‘spotless’ water filters out there. Some are a simple cheap inline filter, some are double canisters, or wall mounted for the professionals. Some costs hundreds of pounds to buy, a little overkill for a weekend warrior like me. There was plenty of research undertaken before the purchase I made here. The biggest part of the water filtration is how it’s done. The resin is the critical part of the process, the more you have, the type of resin and how the water is passed through the filtration process is where the results come from.

Cheap and nasty won’t give you spectacular results as the minerals will still be in the water.

Ease of use – 10 out 10

Finish – 10 out 10

Conclusion:

Game changer for me!

This is not for the everyday ‘wash n go’ type of person, as the equipment can be expensive based on what you want. But, for me the time it takes to wash the car, run around trying to dry the car, then remove water spots just to get a clean car was driving me mad. To the point I was ‘waterless’ washing the car. But when the car was covered in serious debris like sand in the rain from Europe or wherever it comes from, ‘waterless’ is then not an ideal method and could cause damage if care is not taken. In fact waterless washing is not intended for heavily soiled car. Waterless is a regular top up maintenance wash when the car is no to dirty.

If you are in a nice soft water area, then you won’t need this. But, in my part of the country hard water is a real issue. Using a get wash on the car did get rid of heavy dirt, but the trade of was the water spots. This took more time to rectify than the actual washing of the car itself.

The Parts Per Million:

I got 18 eventually not quite 100% deionised with 0ppm. BUT, it is good enough for me from what I have seen. I will closely monitor the PPM with each wash, when the ppm creeps up I will then change the resin. I suspect that the hose pipes were super filthy and my results reflect that. Perhaps a lesser flow rate (as I have good water pressure) would allow the water more time to filter out.

This new setup is means I can use a hosepipe without having to use a jet wash, I will look into a snow foam cannon for a hose pipe too. Or just use a pump action bottle to apply the snow foam, should I need too.

Consider The Costs:

Firstly there is the purchase price of the SpotBye system which has 5ltr of the resin supplied. Then there is the ongoing maintenance cost using this method.

According to the sales pitch you can get: “approximately get 520 gallons of pure deionized water under typical water conditions with a total dissolved solids (TDS) content of 200ppm (depending on the TDS level of the water in your area).”

My area is 50% worse than that at 300ppm. So I’m expecting around 350 to 400 gallons.

The resins vary in cost so to keep math super simple guestimates, the cost of resin is around £35 for 5ltr which does 350 gallon. Let’s say a worst case scenario is going to be £1 a car wash including the purchase of the equipment to start with, I can live with that. The cost per wash will go down next time as the cost will just be for the resin.

The bonus is I shouldn’t need dedicated spot removal products and spend hours cleaning. The cost of those products can be offset against the cost of the resin refill. As they say, time is money.

Would I recommend it? Yes.

Would I buy it again? Yes.

Update: