(quirky music)
- Okay.
The other day, I was taking my Camaro out for a spin
when a jerk of a bird pooped on my hood.
Now while that was only mildly annoying,
immediately after that,
an entire roster of birds, a full attack crew,
decided my car was their splat target for today.
(splat)
So not to be shown up by a bird,
I pulled into a nearby carwash and I got to thinking,
what are all these mystery chemicals getting doused
on my beloved catfish.
Could any of these liquids be bad for my paint?
And I chose the most expensive option.
The one with that fancy tri-colored foam.
Was that worth the cost?
Or did I just get screwed?
Well I don't like getting screwed.
Ever!
So today we're going full Bill Nye on car soap.
We're gonna see what juice
really comes out of those sprayers.
And figure out
if you should just skip the automated carwash completely.
You think you can just lure me in with foam, huh!
Not today!
(laughs)
(upbeat music)
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Now, let's get back to B2B.
(upbeat jingle)
- The carwash biz is a booming.
And by booming, I mean $28 billion booming.
All in the sake of keeping entropy at bay.
The car, it's got a natural tendency to become dirty.
But what does it mean to be dirty?
The biggest contributor to getting your car dirty
is actually oil.
When you're driving around the less than pristine
streets of Los Angeles, the grime of the road
gets flung up onto your car,
where dust, pollen or actual dirt, then clings onto it.
When you splat a bug, that's a bonus oil.
When a bird poops on your car, that's got oil in it too
and some other things, which we're gonna get to.
But at the end of the day,
the reason you need soap to clean your car,
is because of oil.
If we were to zoom into the molecular level,
we can see why we need that soap.
Water, it's a polar molecule.
It has an uneven distribution of electron density.
When oxygen and hydrogen bond to form water,
they're formed by covalent bonds with their electrons.
And these electrons favor one side of the molecule
where oxygen is present,
creating a very highly negative area.
On the other side, you now have a more positive area
due to the protons of the hydrogen atom.
And because of this, we now have a polar molecule.
You got a positive side and you got a negative side.
On the other hand, oil, it doesn't have poles.
And because of this,
these oil molecules are hard to bond with,
like you and your stepdad.
Now if you've ever tried to wash a greasy thumb print
off your car with just water, you know from experience,
it doesn't work.
But back in the Roman years, some smarty pants figured out
that if you took a fatty acid, some sort of animal fat
and you mixed it with an alkaline substance,
that's something that has a pH greater than seven,
you can make a material that would connect water and oil.
A material called, soap.
Soap molecules are great for bridging water and oil
because it shares some qualities of each of them.
The alkaline substance in soap gives it a polar head
at one end that is hydrophilic.
So it bonds to water.
On the other end, that fatty acid of soap
gives it a long tail of hydrogen and carbon atoms.
Those bond with the oil.
So when the soap is bound on both sides,
it suspends the oil, lifting it off the surface.
So I have here a jar that has oil and water in it.
And as you can see, these two, they don't mix.
And I can shake it.
I can try my hardest to get them to bond
but it won't happen.
But when I added in a little bit of soap
and I shake it and I wait, the mixture doesn't separate.
The soap has bound the two together.
(explosion)
Okay, great.
So now we know how soap works.
But when you go to a carwash,
there are multiple types of liquids
getting sprayed all over your car.
There's a pre soak, there's a shampoo.
There's the tri foam.
Are all these just different variations of soap?
Well the carwash we chose to do our testing,
is a true touchless carwash.
It uses high pressure sprayers to help clean your car.
Instead of using a physical touch,
like a wash mitt to aid in lifting the oil and dirt away,
it uses low and high pH chemicals to dissolve the dirt.
Now pH, it's just a measure of how acidic or basic
a liquid is.
There's a range and it goes from zero to 14,
with seven being neutral right dab in the middle.
But pH is really a measure of the relative amount
of free hydrogen and hydroxyl ions in the solution.
There's even an equation for it,
if you really wanna nerd out while you turd out.
But for the sake of this video,
the pH of soap determines the chemical aggressiveness
of its oil lifting potential
and which types of yucky stuff it attacks best.
So let's start off with the pre soak.
It's like the shower at the pool that nobody uses.
And depending on which wash you go through,
will determine the pH level of the pre soak.
Low pH pre soaks help by removing inorganic materials.
Things like sand or salt,
if you live in areas where they salt the roads
in the winter.
High pH pre soaks help clean away the organic stuff.
That sap and bugs and greases.
They also help neutralize any acid that's left over
on your car's paint, acid like bird poop.
Bird poop contains a chemical called uric acid.
The uric acid lowers the pH levels in bird poop
down to between three to 4.5.
That's plenty low for their previous meal
to etch your paint.
So if a bird poops on your car,
you got to get it off of there, get it off.
So let's look at the pH of the presoak at this carwash.
For that, we're gonna sample some of this soap
and run a few tests.
Science.
(horn honks)
So I expected this pre soak to have a relatively high pH.
And it did.
It makes sense, right?
If you live in a city, you're gonna want a high pH pre-soak
to help clean off all that city grime and oil
that gets accumulated on your car
when you're hitting the mean streets of Los Angeles.
Now let's get to the soapy part of the wash,
the shampoo or detergent.
Now there are hundreds, thousands, maybe billions of soaps.
So what makes one better or worse
or more pricey than the others?
Well it boils down to what are the active ingredients
or the cost of developing those active ingredients?
Newer carwash soaps contain ingredients
that are specifically made to better penetrate
under the surface of the dirt,
encapsulating it so it's easier to be removed.
When talking automated carwashes,
those types of soaps require less water
so they can save in operating costs.
The pH of your shampoo is also important,
depending on the grime level of your ride.
See, not all areas in the world
have the same type of dirty cars.
If you don't live in a city where you get a lotta road grime
in the oil variety, thrown all over your car,
you're not gonna want a soap with a high pH.
You want a neutral or low pH soap
that lifts and holds the oil until it's rinsed off.
Preparing your car for the next step in the wash.
And that is the tri foam.
Now I don't know the psychology of it
but there is something mesmerizing about watching a car
get all sudsy.
But, we're here for science,
so what exactly is that stuff doing?
Well tri foam acts as either a conditioner or polisher
or both, depending on the carwash.
The difference between the two,
is that conditioners help clean the car,
while polish contains a certain amount of wax
and polishing compound in addition to the cleaner in it.
The tri foam is a neutral to acidic solution.
And its end goal
is to help prepare the clear coat for waxing.
So your car's paint, it's multilayered.
You have your base metal and then you have a primer
and then you have your base coat.
And finally, you got your clear coat.
And that clear coat, it's there to protect the paint
from the sun and ultraviolet rays.
And it makes the color of your base coat
look way deeper and more rich.
And when and it's always, when, you get any scratches,
the thicker clear coat can be buffed out
without damaging the paint.
So the polisher in this tri foam, in theory,
is doing exactly that.
Smoothing out the surface of your clear coat.
Okay but what's with the colors?
Okay that's all that I wanna know.
Are the yellows and blues and reds,
are they different chemicals?
Are they doing different things?
Are they, are they Jer?
No, no they're not.
Okay, so it seems like I may have been a little bit wrong.
When I first started doing research for this episode,
a lot of sources told me that the three colors of the foam
were the exact same ingredients, same chemical makeup.
They were just dyed differently.
But, when I went to the carwash
that we did our experiment at,
I noticed that there was three individual jugs over there,
that had different labels on them.
So I went online and I did a little research
and pulled up the MSDS.
That's a Material Safety Data Sheet,
for each of those three chemicals.
And here's what we found out.
The red portion of the foam is the wax portion.
And it has detergents in there, as well as wax, of course.
The blue is another type of shampoo,
it's called high foam shampoo.
And it has 2-butoxyethanol, Sodium Alkylsulfonates
and coconut Diethanolamine.
And those are used as a foaming and emulsifying agent.
Now the yellow is an alkaline shampoo.
And what makes it alkaline, is Sodium Hydroxide
or caustic soda.
Now it will burn you if you just touch it,
which is why you should never be a dummy like me
and get inside a carwash.
So you might be asking yourself, Jer, well, each color,
obviously is a different formulation
but they all have some form of detergent
or surfactant in it, I'd be like, yeah, that's right.
But that's because there are a ton of different types
of dirt and oil.
And each one of those chemicals
is specific for a type of dirt.
Now in my experience,
polish needs some sort of physical pressure to be applied.
At the heart of it, polish is just really fine sandpaper.
It has a small amount of grit in it
that roughens up the surface.
Now we're at a touchless carwash,
so how can you polish it without touching?
So today we're gonna do a little test.
I got my catfish here.
And I have the hood taped off.
One side we're gonna get the pricey wash.
Next, we're gonna get the basic wash.
And I have a portable microscope here,
so along the way, I'm gonna use it
to better analyze the paint and see if there's a difference.
(water sprays)
We're back at the office.
Got my portable microscope here.
So I'm gonna take a look at each section
under this microscope
and determine if there are any visible differences
that we could tell.
So right off the bat, just using my eyeballs,
there's no difference.
Okay.
They look exactly the same.
But you know what?
This is a very expensive piece of scientific equipment.
So I'm on the expensive side right now
and it's better than before
but there's still a lot of dirt here.
So let's go over to the cheap side
and look at that.
And it looks identical.
Bummer, expensive carwash.
It just took more of my money.
Running your car through an automated carwash,
at the heart of it, is simply convenient.
Sometimes you just need a quick wash.
But if I'm being honest,
I never actually run my car through one of these.
I prefer the good old fashioned way.
Getting a couple of your buddies to wash your car down
in the parking lot of where you work.
Thank you guys so much for watching this episode of B2B.
Follow me on Instagram, @jeremiahburton
and follow us on Donut, @donutmedia.
But until next week.
Bye for now.
Also, if you heard a fly buzzing around.
His a little (beep) head, (beep) that fly.
(laughs)