Winter cleaning is hard. Just accept that!
Check out Junkman2000 on YouTube for lots of great tips for new and advanced detailing, that’s how I learned.
1) No, in winter there is no magic spell to keep the stuff off the car. Between salt and chemical, with the frosting of road dirt, sand, brake dust in the snow it’s a lot. If you like a clean car, winter will let loose OCD tendencies. You will have to spend some time cleaning in the winter. There is no way around it.
2) Find a quiet touchless and manual wash garage with doors. Get used to using it. It’s best to keep the road gunk from building up in layers.
3) Do not, I repeat do not use the brush as a car wash. That goes for manual broom bubble things or auto wash garages that have brushes. They will ruin your paint. We are going to assume you already know this.
4) For getting caked on gunk, go to a manual car wash, wash and rinse the heck out of it first. Then get clean micro cloths or clean sponges and either use the washes pre wash soap of get a foaming canister to add your own foam bath (again after it already clean). Then wash it well with the pre wash or foaming soap. Fold the microfiber into 4ths which gives you 8 clean sides to use. I like the large Maguire micros. Wipe off one panel, then the side is done. The idea is you don’t rub in the dirt. With a sponge, make sure to rinse out the sponge in one of those buckets that have a screen in the bottom and or don’t let the sponge hit the bottom and pick up removed dirt. Seems like a lot of work, but it’s not really. The idea again is to not rub dirt back into the paint.
DOSE 60 oz 2L One-Handed Portable Pump Pressurized Foaming Sprayer
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5) So that’s my winter cleaning method, the waterless washes abs bucket wash doesn’t work well on a car with caked on winter muck.
Now to make all that easier you want a good sealed base, a ceramic, a ceramic hybrid wax (which is what I used from Meguires). You need a good layered and built up protection so that the winter muck doesn’t stick. This is hard to do in the winter when it’s too cold outside to properly apply. With that in mind after you clean it well. Using a good spray wax on the clean car then rinsing, and a final wipe off when it’s just above freezing , should get you though the winter. If you don’t have the good base, you’re just going to have to clean it more until next spring.
When you have a good base built up, the car wash rinse off in the winter, as long as you don’t let it cake into should get you buy. Then on days that are super cold you can detail spray after the ronde off, using that 8 quadrant wipe off technique.
6) There are endless products for sealants, waxes, cleaning etc. Honestly and good brand will be fine. I have yet to find a premium product that really out performs Meguires for the money, and availability. The turtle stuff I’m less fond of. It’s seems to be a little less quality than Meguires stuff but some of it is just fine. Turtle brands seem to separate faster in the bottle, and tend to wipe off with more effort. Some of their higher end stuff is just fine though.
Everyone has an opinion about on method and product. You have to balance an amount of time that you want to spend with an amount of time that a professional would spend and figure out what works for you. How much effort do you want to put into it.
Me, every spring, I will do a deep clean, then use IronX to remove brake dust and road funk diluted with distilled water. The stuff smells terrible so don’t use it in the garage. Then I’ll seal up the paint and start laying up hybrid wax. Sometimes I’ll do a ceramic on my cars abs then you using don’t have to do a full clean (remove all seal t) , ironx, etc every year. I’ll clean it well in the spring and then use a ceramic refresher over the ceramic coating.
The short answer is, get a good sealant, wax, ceramic base on the car, then things won’t stick. You can use detailing sprays and foam baths to get things off beteen major washes. For me once I have a good base, I’ll use the 8 quadrant micro wipe of 2-4 times per week to keep it clean. Takes 10-15 minutes. I find it cathartic to keep the car clean.
Same thing in the winter but I have a garage to keep the car just above freezing most of the time. For those sloppy slushy days and weeks of winter, you simply have to rinse it off often at a car wash, there is just too much junk in that crap to simply wipe off. No way around that.
