How Often Should You Wash Your Car? Get Answer to All the Queries
Why do people wash their car? Everyone wants their car to look like factory-perfect and maintaining the appearance also means keeping the resale value high. Plus, who does not love to hear compliments from complete strangers about how good your road companion looks? But, how often should you wash your car?
How Often Should You Wash Your Car?
How often should I wash my car? Every car owner must have wondered about it at some point. It’s common sense that you should not drive the car with all those dirt, mud, and bird droppings on it. But, the busy lifestyle pushes us for other important things, thrusting the car wash to the wayside.
Well, good news for all the busy bees is that there is no need to wash your car every day. The frequency of car washing depends on a few factors. Read them and make a schedule that suits you:
The Driving Routes
The roads where you usually drive your car and the environmental and climatic conditions of the area you live in are great factors in deciding how often to wash car. Do you live or drive in a woodland, industrial areas, or near the ocean?
The car’s paint could be corroded with bird droppings and tree sap in a forest area and the salty air and water of the ocean areas can create the same effect. The industrial cities have a high level of air pollution. So, living or driving in these areas will require washing on a weekly basis.
The Driving Distance
Do you need to drive a lot on a regular basis? If you have to drive a long distance daily, the car will be exposed more to contaminants and air pollutants. Bird droppings and splattered bugs are two things that can discolor the exterior surface if left without cleaning for a long time. Leaving them for too long is dangerous because the cleaning will be almost impossible in that case without causing damage.
Frequent exposure to these things requires weekly washing but a monthly cleaning will do if the car has limited contact with these things.
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Weather Conditions
Living in an area with extreme heat, heavy rainfall, or a high level of snowfall warrants frequent washing, at least once a week.
Intense heat speeds up the erosion caused by various toxin materials such as tree sap and bird poops. If you don’t clean them and keep driving the car under the hot sun, the contaminants will destroy the vehicle’s wax protection. As a result, the paint will deteriorate fast. On the other hand, too much moisture in the air locks in the pollutants, initiating and accelerating rusting.
Another cause of rusting is living and driving in a coastal region. The air in such an area carries a high amount of salt that can corrode the vehicle’s metal frame if left without cleaning for a long time. Also, cities and industrial regions have many toxic elements in the air. These things are the reason for acid rain. If your car is caught up in a heavy shower, a good rinse afterward in necessary.
How often should you wash your car if you live in such weather conditions? Washing regularly once in a week will be enough in these cases.
Garage Condition
The condition of the place where you store the car also determines the washing frequency. Keeping the vehicle in a dry, closed garage limits its exposure to pollutants, requiring fewer washes. But, keeping it in the driveway or under a tree without any protective cover, you will need to wash it every week.
Also, there are some specific times when you need to wash the car at least twice per week, given that you drive the car daily and commute a significant distance. For example, you should maintain the twice-per-week schedule when it is the bug season, rainy season, and peak of the summertime.
Is It Bad to Wash Your Car Too Much?
Some people who treasure their car highly like to wash it daily or a couple of times per week at least. But, the question remains if frequent washing damages the car paint or not.
The truth is you can wash the car as many times as you want. Washing, as a matter of fact, removes the corrosive and abrasive particles from the car’s body. These damaging fragments can cause rust formation, break down the paint layer, and weather the rubber seals.
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Incorrect washing technique rather than frequent washing is what damages the car’s paint. The surface will be filled with numerous swirl marks because of it. It particularly happens during the drying process because rubbing the rags on the surface means rubbing numerous micro-particles across the paint, which causes scratch marks.
So, how often should you wash your car? Depends on several variables but frequent washing does not do any harm. But, either you have to know the right technique or have the car cleaned by a professional service to avoid scratches and unnecessary wear and tear.
