Great thread!

May I just add that If you are washing your car, you can limit the negative impact of nearly all the chemical treatments you use by driving your car onto the lawn for the process. The biological process occurring in a functioning soil system is enough to detoxify most all of your commercial products.

The real problem with any washing is when it gets dumped straight into a sewer/river system. The concentration is such that what may be a relatively benign chemical is quite destructive because of the concentration.

[quote=Mr Bean]

May I just add that If you are washing your car, you can limit the negative impact of nearly all the chemical treatments you use by driving your car onto the lawn for the process. The biological process occurring in a functioning soil system is enough to detoxify most all of your commercial products. QUOTE]

Interesting; if I put my car on the lawn to wash it, I'll get comments from my neighbors about, well, being a trashy neighbor.......
Also, won't the soap products kill the grass?
If they don't kill the grass i'll start doing this....

It shouldn't kill the grass or other landscaping. As Mr Bean noted, the grass and other biological components (earthworms, natural chemicals and nutrients, etc.) in the soil will filter out the worst of it. People typically spill worse things in their grass at times (dumping the remnants of the morning's coffee cup into the grass, or the remnants of a can of soda, etc.)

I'd wash my car in my grass if I could, but we have too many oak trees to make it navigable and I'm reluctant to leave tire tracks in my yard since our soil is thin enough ( thin soil covered by a solid layer of limestone rock a couple inches below! ) My reason would be to recapture all the wastewater rather than having it flow down my driveway and/or evaporate on the hot pavement. As it is, the times I do wash my vehicle in my driveway, much of the wastewater flows directly into my front yard grass due to the angle of my driveway. No grass yellowing or other issues as a result, so I'd say that's pretty good unscientific evidence that the typically very gentle car wash soaps are not dangerous to grass, in reasonable amounts.

That said, most of the time I take our vehicles to a do-it-yourself car wash that, due to where it's located, has to reclaim its waste water (not sure of the logistics, but we're over the Edwards Aquifer, the primary fresh water source for millions of Texans). I then drive home to do the drying and, if I'm doing it, waxing, in the comfort of my garage.

With our FEH, we got a car wash club membership for 1 year so I take it there except when I'm doing a full detail (wash, clay bar, wax, interior detail, etc.) Their water reclamation requirements are similar, at least in South Texas.

- Shannon (Geeky, Wild Texan)

Ah, now that's where my beautifully manicured dandalion lawn comes in handy! The soap doesn't hurt the prolific yellow weeds at all. Washing a car over a lawn is also more comfortable than on a driveway.

So now you all know: I'm too cheap for Weed-n-feed, to lazy to water, too dumb to mow.

The soap should not harm your lawn. It is one of the main ingredients in lots of recipes for home made lawn tonics. The soap is a wetting agent that helps water penetrate deeper into the soil and encourages deep root growth.

I don't think there is anything "trashy" about pulling your car onto your lawn to wash it. That's what I did until I finally got sprinklers installed.

Pulling onto the lawn- never thought of that. See- you learn somethign new every day!

I got the Mr Clean no-dry carwash kit. Some interesting (water saving) things about it:

- the wash nozzle is lowflow, so you don't use as much in the 1st place to wet the car or wash off suds.
- the soap used is very low-sudsing, so you use even less water to wash the suds off. But man is it a good cleanser!
-the de-ionized water rinse that gives the spot-free air dry is little more than a mist that you 'spraypaint' the car with when you're done.

Looking at the puddle in the driveway after I am done, I estimate I use well under 1/2 the water I was using with the hode & bucket. And it's so nice not having to chamois the car off!