How cold is too cold?

J

jhigday

New member
Well, it's been a good month or two since i've able to clean my car, and it's really starting to bother me. I live in Oregon, and theres going to be no rain this entire weekend, and the temperature is in the upper 40's during the day. Unfortantly I have no garage to work inside with my car, so i have to detail outside. So how cold is too cold to work on your car outside?
 
Anywhere above freezing (I don't know what that is in your crazy American degrees ... 32 is it?) and you should be fine. Wear a hat! Any polishing you do might also take a little longer.
 
I just washed my car, and it was 24*F in my garage. My cutoff point is about 30 for washing now (tired of this BS), and 35*F for any type of polishing/waxing/etc...



I plan to move to Oregon in 2 years, because I want to get out of this area. Below freezing temps for months at a time... :(
 
I really hope I'm able to throw another coat of KSG on my car when I come home for Christmas Break in a week. My parents aren't allowing me to wash my car in the driveway since it creates a large patch of ice that doesn't seem to go away until springtime, so I think I might pull my car into the grass (that has snowed piled up on it now) and wash my car out there where ice is expected to be. I need to go invest in some rubber gloves so I can throw some fleece gloves underneath to keep my hands warm and dry when washing.

My plan: Wash, wheels with AIO, another KSG layer or two, and two layers of Liquid Soverean. I can't wait to see the results.
 
White95Max, I have to hand it to ya. 24 degrees is too cold for me. Do yourself a favor and get a garage heater. I bought one of those torpedo heaters two years ago. (runs on propane) I can get my garage about 35 degrees above whatever the actual air temp is outside. I'm with you though about moving. Wisconsin can get pretty cold at times as you and I know.
 
III, here's the problem. My apartment building contains 8 units, each of which has a garage. The garages are all in one long 8-garage building. The garage next to mine recently had the door pushed in (looks like someone backed into it). So there is a gap on the side of the door that is a good 4-5" wide, in which cold air rushes in. Between my garage and that garage, there is just a thick sheet of plywood. But the plywood is only about 8ft tall. That means there is a HUGE gap (50"+ in the center, where the roof is highest) above the plywood. There is no tenant in that unit, so that garage is always empty. The landlord isn't concerned with fixing it, at least until spring, since nobody lives in that unit. And frankly, complaining about drafts in my garage won't fetch any sympathy. I'm afraid I'll be taking the car to the touchless wash every weekend until it gets above 30*F outside.

So buying a heater and paying for the electricity to power it, would probably not be as beneficial as I would like. The heat would just escape way too fast to heat the garage up much.
 
32 degrees is the minimum you will need to keep the car clean. It is very important IMO that you keep the car as clean and as often as possible (weather permitting). Where I am, usually my wax season would've ended in november, thus by december and onward I don't think about waxing, unless I get an unusually warm day in december, and I have the time to go over it once. I would've built up a good amount of wax during the warm months to float by during the winter.



Keeping the car clean, however, is the most important thing during winter. You can get yourself a quick detail spray and continue to do detailing as often as you like, given that its above 32 degrees.
 
jhigday said:
So how cold is too cold to work on your car outside?
Click to expand...



Getting back to the original question, I personally wouldn't wax or seal if it's less than 45 degrees. When it comes to polishing I wouldn't go much lower than 32 degrees. If it's too cold for you to wax or seal, or you don't want to spend your time freezing, I would at least use products like Eagle One Wax as U dry, which will help protect your vehicle from the winter elements. It's not as good as a full wax job, but it's better than nothing.



Here's a link from the meguiar's site which may be helpful.



http://www.meguiars.com/faq/index.cfm?faqCat=Product Questions&faqQuestionID=34&section=_34#_34
 
Maybe you could block the crunched in garage door or take matters into your own hands and "correct" the garage door problem yourself with a hammer. Maybe even a rope somehow tied to the garage and then pulling the bend back into shape.



How did you end up QEWing when the temperature was only 24? does QEW act as an anti-freeze in the water and lower the temperature needed to freeze the water? If not, why didn't the water freeze to the panels?
 
The whole track of the garage door is pulled off of the wall. I'm not going to risk trying to "fix" it myself, because if anything happened I'd get blamed for the whole thing. It's not just a bent part of the door, it's the entire door that is pushed in and crooked.



No, QEW doesn't act as an antifreeze. I used warm-hot water and washed a small section at a time. In that way, you have about a minute before it freezes to the panel. I was planning on waxing the car with IW845, but I did see a couple small patches of ice on the paint, and I decided that it'd be best to just wait for a day when it was above freezing to wax the car again.
 
It was 20 when I started the other day, maybe 45 in the actual garage and 38 in the afternoon when I was out in the open, near freezing when I finished for the day. If you can handle the cold, and the extra towels and time it takes to clean a car, go for it. If I want to eat in the winter, I don't have a choice.



If I was only detailing as a hobby, my cut off point would be any time it is under 75. ;)
 
jhigday said:
So how cold is too cold to work on your car outside?
Click to expand...





Here are my guidelines for knowing when it's too cold to work on a car outside.





You know it's too cold when the warmest part of the day finally reaches the freezing mark and it's about one 1/2 hour before sunset.



You know it's too cold when you have to break out your ski hat, jacket, pants, gloves and boots in an attempt to try to keep warm while you're working.



You know it's too cold when you wear three pairs of gloves and you still can't feel your fingers.



You know it's too cold when you wash your car and the entire car turns into one giant horizontal ice cube.



You know it's too cold when you have to leave your car running and the heater on high just to keep the wash water from freezing.



You know it's too cold when the window cleaner you're using freezes to the glass.



You know it's too cold when you have to shovel more than 8 inches of snow just to get to your car.



You know it's too cold when you finally realize that the wax you're applying just is not going to dry properly due to the falling snow.



You know it's too cold when you begin counting the days until Spring and it's not even Winter yet.
 
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