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Whether you are an amateur cleaning your own car or a professional detailing twelve cars a day, you should get well au fait with the chemicals used in the industry, because all chemicals are dangerous if misused.

However, safety is just part of the reason for getting to know the chemicals used for cleaning cars, you also have to know if someone is trying to sell you liquids that will or just cannot do the job.

There are a lot of charlatans in any line of business and a fool and his money are soon parted. Knowing the chemicals used for cleaning cars will help you avoid being cheated by suppliers.

For instance, you will often hear people say that you can clean the inside of a car using the liquid from just one bottle.

This is simply not true, particularly if you have various textiles inside the car like plastic door linings, cloth carpets and leather upholstery. It is only not possible to detail all these different textiles well with just one fluid.

Surfactants are clever kinds of soap-like substances and are made up of different ingredients, a little like combined shampoo and conditioner for humans. These surfactant molecules consist of two kinds a hydrophile and a hydrophobe. The hydrophobe is attracted to dirt and it tries to break it down, while the hydrophile envelopes the dirt so that it can be borne away.

The most widespread solvent known to man is water, but it has just a limited action on grease, so in the case of grease, manufacturers turn to butyl and dilemonene, which is extracted from lemon and orange peel. These solvents are expensive, but they are fairly harmless and can be used on a number of surfaces.

Other fats, such as perspiration, can be washed away using animal fats that have been cured with a saponifier, which is usually a powerful alkaline. This does not sound very pleasant, but we have all used soap made from animal fats.

The animal fat mixes with the human fat (say perspiration) and they dissolve into one another. The alkaline then breaks them down so that they can get borne away. You do this each day when you bathe or take a shower.

The science of cleaning is quite a complicated one when you begin looking into it, but why certain products are just effective for one sort of job only becomes apparent when you do study it.

However, after you do find out what is really going on and where the chemicals have come from, a lot of people wish that they had not taken the time to go into the topic.

In summary, and to keep it easy (more for my sake than for yours, I assure you) try to treat like with like. Be wary of using a chemical for other than its specified job without having conducted trials on out-of-sight patches. Endeavour to use petroleum based cleaners on oil; alkaline cleaners on organic materials and acids on non-organic materials.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on lots of topics, but is now involved with auto interior detailing. If you want some tips on detailing cars come over to our website now at Detailing Car Interiors.

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