Top Tips for Maintaining Your Tunnel Car Wash

3 Tips for Maintaining a Tunnel Car Wash

A tunnel car wash is different from self-service car washes for one simple reason: the customer doesn’t need to do the work. Unlike a self-service car wash, a tunnel wash is as simple as driving your car up to the conveyor, putting it in neutral and enjoying the show.

This means that a tunnel car wash is always going to be more complex than a self-service car wash. With that complexity comes increased maintenance.

If you would like to stay ahead on tunnel car wash maintenance, we recommend these tips:

• Expect tunnel car washes to have problems
• Make a schedule to address repairs
• Do cleanings and inspections together

1. Expecting Your Tunnel Car Wash to Have Problems

A good car wash owner knows that fixing what breaks on the car wash right away keeps it operational and making money.

A great car wash owner knows that, by the time something breaks, you’ve already missed your window of preventing that problem to begin with.

This is where a little cynicism can go a long way. If you want to stop being surprised when something breaks on your car wash, you need to think one step ahead. Equipment that hasn’t had an issue in a while is just waiting to have a problem.

Car wash owners who buy used car wash tunnel equipment know this all too well. We all like to save a few bucks buying something used and it’s easy to approach it optimistically. But the second you see some mysterious drop in water pressure, you feel your heart sink and know you’ve been caught flat-footed.

Instead, have some cynicism that you are in one of these stages:

• Monitoring and looking for trouble
• Continuing to repair something because the cost-to-repair is cheaper than the cost to replace
• Looking to replace equipment because it’s no longer profitable to continue to repair.

2. Making a Tunnel Car Wash Maintenance Schedule

The simplest first step to a comprehensive maintenance schedule is a checklist of everything in your car wash tunnel system. If you have an inventory of everything in your car wash, you know what pieces of the car wash could fail and, therefore, what parts to check on long before they fail.

One tip we’ve heard is that everything in your tunnel car wash can be loosely categorized by the physical material that is involved. If you are familiar with Aristotle’s 4 elements—water, earth, fire, air—the only difference here is that fire is replaced with electrical and earth with equipment.

• Water
• Equipment
• Electrical
• Air

Water: Think of everything related to the water system, including the chemicals. This includes things like clogs in pipes, car wash pits, water softeners and failed check valves. Because tunnel car washes perform their primary function using water, this is the top category of maintenance.

Equipment: Conveyor bearings, faulty foot valves or other mechanical maintenance falls into this category. The primary concern here is physical particulates creating friction and adding unnecessary wear and tear. Additionally, your car wash pits fall into equipment because if they are backed up, your complimentary equipment will suffer.

Electrical: No tunnel car wash could operate without panels in working condition. Both customer-facing and behind-the-scenes electrical equipment need regular checkups.

Air: This covers anything on your drying equipment or air compressor.

Sorting your maintenance into these categories helps you to think about what will be physically involved when you go through your checklist. Checking things related to water might require your plumbing toolkit but your electrical problems could require having an electrician on speed dial.

If the first step in creating your tunnel car wash maintenance schedule is a complete inventory, the second step is going to depend a lot on your specific car wash. Car wash maintenance can vary significantly depending on car volume and type of cars that you wash. For example, a tunnel car wash that handles a lot of unsteady drivers might wear down its conveyor faster than one that doesn’t.

3. Cleaning Time Is Inspection Time

When you clean something, you are making it easy on yourself to look at it and interact with it. One simple tip to keeping up with maintenance is giving yourself more time to clean your equipment.

When it comes to mechanical equipment, the cleaner it is, the slower it will wear down. That’s why maintenance schedules should include time for both repairs and cleaning—especially your car wash pits.

Cleaning should include using the correct cleaning agent for your equipment. Aluminum equipment might have an adverse reaction to some cleaning agents that are better on stainless steel.

Help Maintain Your Car Wash with Pit Crew’s Pit Cleaning Services

Keeping your car wash clean is essential to keeping it open and operating. For instance, consider your car wash pit. As hundreds of cars come through, they leave behind mud and contaminated liquids. These pile up in your pits between cleanings.

It’s nearly impossible to clear out these pits on your own. It’s messy and you might not have the best method for disposing of the sludge. Your best bet is hiring reliable professionals.

If that sounds easier to you, call Pit Crew. We’ll help take that off your plate so you have more time for maintaining your tunnel car wash.

Contact us today to schedule a routine car wash pit cleaning.