Chemicals Used For Cleaning Cars

Whether you are an amateur detailing your own car or a professional a dozen cars a day, you should become well au fait with the chemicals used in the industry, because all chemicals are dangerous if misused.

However, safety is only part of the reason for getting to know the chemicals used for detailing cars, you also have to know if someone is attempting to sell you liquids that will or merely cannot do the job.

There are a lot of charlatans in any line of business and a fool and his money are soon parted. Knowing the chemicals used for detailing cars will help you avoid being duped by suppliers.

For example, you will often hear salesmen say that you can clean the inside of a car using the liquid from merely one bottle.

This is simply not true, especially if you have various textiles inside the car like plastic door linings, cloth carpets and leather upholstery. It is only not feasible to clean all these different textiles well with just one fluid.

Surfactants are clever kinds of soap-like substances and are made up of different ingredients, a bit like combined shampoo and conditioner for humans. These surfactant molecules consist of two kinds a hydrophile and a hydrophobe. The hydrophobe is attracted to dirt and it attempts to break it down, while the hydrophile envelopes the dirt so that it can be taken away.

The most common solvent known to man is water, but it has only a limited effect on grease, so in the case of grease, manufacturers turn to butyl and dilemonene, which is extracted from lemon and orange peel. These solvents are costly, but they are pretty harmless and can be used on a number of surfaces.

Other fats, such as perspiration, can be washed away using animal fats that have been treated with a saponifier, which is normally a powerful alkaline. This does not sound very pleasant, but we have all used soap manufactured from animal fats.

The animal fat mixes with the human fat (say perspiration) and they dissolve into one another. The alkaline then breaks them down so that they can get carried away. You do this every day when you wash or take a shower.

The science of cleaning is quite a complicated one when you start looking into it, but why some products are only good for one type of job only becomes evident when you do study it.

However, when you do find out what is really going on and where the chemicals have come from, a lot of individuals wish that they had not taken the time to go into the issue.

In summary, and to keep it easy (more for my benefit than for yours, I assure you) strive to treat like with like. Be wary of using a chemical for other than its specified job without having conducted trials on out-of-sight areas. Try to use petroleum based cleaners on oil; alkaline cleaners on organic materials and acids on non-organic materials.