Efficient Car Clean
She was splashing jets of water across the three meters long beefy SUV for the past fifteen minutes, cleaning the mudguards, the body, and the glass, every inch of it. Ironically, Sarita, who washes the car of her employer with free running water, does not have enough water at home to take a bath!
Such is the contrast of plenty in our country that not just food, even water is unevenly distributed across different classes of society, where people like Sarita crave for a single bath in a day while fleets of cars are pampered daily under high-pressure jets. Be it a car wash company, or a domestic vehicle owner, people love to bath their cars like babies, inside out, by gushing gallons of water through each nook and corner. Unfortunately, the precious liquid of life slithers over the metal bodies just to get lost into the dark gutters leaving millions of souls thirsty behind.
Many of us drain quite an accountable amount of water for cleaning the vehicles, a task which can be accomplished by little or no use of water. The math behind this water waster reveals that a standard garden hose drains around 25 litres per minute. So, even a quick 10 minute wash will drain 250 liters of water for cleaning a car, an activity that can actually be done without even using any water. A dusty vehicle can simply be cleaned with a dry mop. In fact, a much better cleansing and finish can be achieved through a combination of dry mopping followed by wet mopping.
Like most of the towns across the country,we have car cleaners in our locality, young guys who come riding on their bicycles bring a spray, and a dusting cloth with them. They dust and mop the vehicle as a daily cleaning routine. The exercise hardly requires four to five liters of water and the vehicle turns out squeezy clean. For deeper cleaning, we prefer to hand him a couple of buckets of greywater from the washing machine drain. We never had to give our vehicle that thorough rinsing of jets gushing through the grooves of tires. In fact, washing tires has got hardly anything to do with vehicle maintenance.
Vehicles in India, bought from hard earned savings of households are pampered a lot. I grew up watching my father bathing his car on sundays. Usually back then, water draining from anywhere in the home would get absorbed in the lawns. Sadly, in modern day cities of the country we have concreted entire housing societies in such a way that its hard for grey water to to find a way to seep back into the earth. It either evaporates, or find its way into sewage gutters. It takes nothing to take one small step towards saving water.Saving water from the car wash is one such a thing that does not require any change of habit. You just need to switch from washing to wiping. In a country with high water stress and even higher population load, car washes are something very fancy to afford. Share your experiences of conserving water from car washes, the journey of change from washing to mopping any other social conundrum that is stopping you from doing it. We are here to help.