Car Cleaning Tip – Don’t Drop The Sponge

Here at Garage Dreams we love sharing tips and techniques for making car care and cleaning easier, faster and more effective.

One quick tip is to make sure that you don’t drop your sponge or mitt on your driveway/garage floor/wherever you are cleaning your car.

This sounds very simple – and it is – but it is something that is often overlooked.

The problem is that when you drop your mitt or sponge (herein referred to as your “cleaning implement”) it is likely to pick up small pieces of dirt, grit and other grime.

Chances are that even if you dunk your cleaning implement back into your bucket (remember to do the two bucket clean method for the best possible results) you won’t get all of these contaminants out.

This means that you can then wind up transferring them back to your paintwork, undoing the benefit of your effort spent cleaning.

More importantly, if there is any hard grit on your cleaning implement, it is possible that this might wind up scratching the paintwork and leaving your car looking worse than before you started.

Therefore, you should always look to have a couple of clean sponges, mitts or whatever cleaning implement you use ready to go.

We recommend the wearable cleaning mitts, something that looks a bit like this:

Keep your wash mitt clean, and if you drop it during the wash process then you should ideally swap to another mitt (in order to minimise the risk of grit and dirt transfer that might scratch your paintwork)

Generally you can machine wash these after use, which does a much better job at washing out any dirt, grit and grime. However, if you prefer an old school sponge, then that is totally fine (in fact, it would be great to hear in the comment section below whether you prefer a sponge or a wash mitt, and why you prefer your choice)

While keeping two (or more) sponges or mitts on hand is a bit more admin work, it is well worth it when you consider that you won’t be risking damage to your paintwork.

Remember to use a good quality car wash as well. We like Meguiar’s Ultimate Wash & Wax, and Mother’s California Gold, but there are plenty of other great products out there on the market.

What is YOUR number one car washing tip? Leave a comment below – we would love to hear from you.

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  • Sam

    Sam focuses mainly on researching and writing the growing database of Car Facts articles on Garage Dreams, as well as creating interesting list content. He is particularly enthusiastic about JDM cars, although has also owned numerous European vehicles in the past. Currently drives a 3rd generation Suzuki Swift Sport, and a Volkswagen Touareg (mainly kept for taking his border collie out to the hills to go walking)

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