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Cleaning Without Access To An Outside Tap/Hosepipe SOLUTION



So with the recent thread about washing cars without access to a hosepipe or pressure washer I started to think up of a solution.

I myself live in a flat, but luckily I can run a hosepipe out so I can give the car a clean. But with summer coming up I'm sure my neighbours would start to get annoyed when I'm out there cleaning the cars every week and also I'm sure with our super hot summer weather (yeh right) we'll have some sort of hose pipe ban.

So I purchased one of these. http://www.screwfix.com/p/7ltr-pres...=Search-_-SearchRec-_-Area1&_requestid=129939


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A 7 litre pump action pressure sprayer. At £10 I thought it would be worth a punt to see if it would solve the problem.

Overall it was actually pretty good. Obviously not up to the pressure of a pressure washer but I was overall pretty pleased with what it achieved. About 30 pumps pressurised enough to cover half of the car.

So firstly I filled the container up to the 7 litre mark, pressurised the container and sprayed the car down.

Then I sprayed the whole car with Auto Finesse Citrus Power diluted to a 1/4 solution. I cannot sing the praises of this product enough. It worked just as well as full strength and obviously it lasts 4 times longer.

Then onto the wheels, I used Bilberry at a 1/10 dilution then worked in with a Valet Pro brush. Again worked very well.

As it is quite a warm day and the paintwork had dried off a little so I rinsed off again. This emptied the container.

Then onto the 2BM method as normal.

This time I filled the container up to around half way and rinsed the car off. Now this does take a little patience especially with the roof to rinse all the suds off.

Then dried and cleaned the glass, treated the plastic and some tyre shine.

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Please excuse the awful iPhone photos but the car looks just as clean as if I used a pressure washer.

Some key points:

This method would not work as well if the car is minging, but it's more then capable for the once a week summer wash to keep on top of the cleaning.

I used around 10 litres of water, plus whatever I used in the two buckets.

It takes around 60 pumps to keep the water pressurised to rinse down the whole car each time.

Takes a little more time and patience to rinse off all the suds.

Drying was a lot easier and quicker as there was a lot less water sitting on the paintwork.

All in all I was pretty happy with my solution and will definitely being using this method again.

Hope this helps :)

 
  182/RS2/ Turbo/Mk1
Environmentally sound too given the lower volume of water used.

If you give a monkeys about such things which I must confess I dont particularly.

Car looks good :)
 
Environmentally sound too given the lower volume of water used.

If you give a monkeys about such things which I must confess I dont particularly.

Car looks good :)

I didn't want to quote environmental reasons as I've no idea how much water you'd use with the traditional hosepipe/ pressure washer. I imagine it would be significantly less with the way I've done it today though.
 
  PH1 Clio 172
I used a watering can when we had the hosepipe ban a few years back, more efficient, annoying and couldn't clean under my wheel arches
 


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