Drying out the car

T

Trans Am 88

New member
Hi I am new to the forum, in fact, this is my fist post. I am a sales manager and detailer at a detail shop and I have been in the industry for just 6 months. I have a question about drying out cars. No matter what method we use to shampoo the seats, carpet, and floor mats of a car they always end up either wet or damp. We have these huge air movers that we put inside the cars and sometimes we run the engine with the heater on and that seams to work. But how do you dry the floormats? We currently vacuum them after we wash them, then we pin them on a wall so that all the water rolls down. The problem is that although the mat dries, we end up with the bottom edge being soaking wet. Another way we do it is by putting them flat on the floor and using one of the air movers to blow air at them. This works too but takes a long time. So how do you dry the carpet mats? I need suggestions, I need help.
 
I should have also mentioned that the detail shop is in Chicago and putting them out to dry in the sun is out of the question because everything is frozen and there is no sun.
 
I do have a carpet extractor and I do use as little water as possible but even then, I am left with wet or damp mats. One thing our shop prides itself on is delivering a dry (and clean) car to the customer. That is why I insist on finding a better solution.
 
You can hang the mats up and use the air attachment from an air compressor to blow the water right out of those mats... saves time and money :)
 
I clean some of my dirtier mats the same way you do. After I am done soaking them down I take something with a flat edge and pull it along the carpet getting most of the water out then I let it hang. As the water builds on the end of the carpet, I repeat the process and then just take a shop vac to it, to take up the rest...while they are not perfectly dry they are just slightly damp...
 
Very effective but very costly...this would be fine if you were churning out alot of cars in a short time, like around once every five to 10 minutes or so...:D
 
I have to wonder how much water is being used on these cars?

temps has a lot to do with how fast they will dry out, but with the air movers they have that should do it fairly quickly
 
With real dirty carpet I use to spray on the cleaner let it sit a bit, scrub the whole mat with a nylon brush then hose it down till the water running off the bottom was clear...

if its anything like that process the mats are soaked...although like I said I would take a flat straight edge and pull the excess off, followed by a shop vac, and then let them hang in the sun while I did the rest of the car, by time I finished they were dry.
 
Stephan said:
With real dirty carpet I use to spray on the cleaner let it sit a bit, scrub the whole mat with a nylon brush then hose it down till the water running off the bottom was clear...

if its anything like that process the mats are soaked...although like I said I would take a flat straight edge and pull the excess off, followed by a shop vac, and then let them hang in the sun while I did the rest of the car, by time I finished they were dry.
Click to expand...

I have the same process and it works like a charm for me...Even when there is no sun...I can still get the mates fairly dry but the time that I finish up the car
 
The only suggestion I have is to just "surface clean" the mats when you have cold weather.
I start with the mats so they will have as much time to dry as possible. I beat the mats over a trash can to knock out as much sand as possible, then vacuum the mats, spray some Meguiar's APC at 8 or 10:1 on them, and brush them thoroughly with a carpet brush. I then let them dry as much as they will while I do the rest of the vehicle. When I am done, I vacuum the mats again and they go back in the vehicle. They will usually be only slightly damp since the "surface cleaning" uses a small amount of water.

FWIW, The "surface cleaning" doesn't do all that bad of a job. After reading a post what a bad job it did, I checked the results. I surface cleaned my mats, then put the mats in the bathtub and soaked them in an APC solution to see just how much crud had been left from the surface cleaning. The wash solution was hardly dirty at all. Leads me to believe the surface cleaning didn't do too bad.
 
I only do this process in the warm weather, right now any mats I do get surfaced cleaned until I can get an extractor...

Also I only do this process on mats that are heavily soiled, not necessarily ones with just some staining...I am talking about ones covered in dirt...like work type trucks..the rest fall under the surface cleaning rule.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top