Dry Ice Cleaning for Vehicles: Precision, Preservation, and Expertise

If you’ve read our dry ice cleaning information page, you’ve probably gathered that we are experienced with dry ice cleaning with hundreds of hours of dry ice cleaning experience under our proverbial belts. You may have learned that it’s a non-abrasive process which is great for collector cars, and that we are happy to have the process as another tool in our shop. After months of research and consulting with experts in the field, we purchased a high quality,  specialized machine that offers the ability to be precise with both air pressure and ice particle size. 

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Dry ice cleaning really is a skill, and an art. To be honest, we didn’t realize the skill and knowledge required to offer the service at a high level that is also safe for our client’s vehicles. The process truly is not as simple as aiming a gun at a vehicle surface to make a surface clean. In order to ensure that we possess the skills necessary to offer safe and effective dry ice cleaning to our clients, we traveled to train with experts in the field, practiced by cleaning our own vehicles, and joined an international vehicle dry ice cleaners community. (Dryce.com) Experience, dedication, training, and proper equipment is hugely important in order for dry ice cleaning to be a safe process, and to be a service we felt we could offer the local car community.

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Case in point; as a very precise process, it’s hugely important that our air system is delivering dry air. If you've watched dry ice cleaning videos, you may have noticed that the process can produce plumes of “smoke.” The plumes look kind of cool on videos, but make it really hard, or impossible, to see what we’re doing as we’re cleaning. Our advanced equipment includes a specialized air dryer, which takes out the haphazard technique of continuing to blast away through big plumes of “smoke.” Therefore making the process much safer for the wide range of vehicle substrates we routinely clean. 

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Dry ice cleaning is thought to be a quick process for cleaning vehicles, and to a point, it truly is. Really, it’s all relative, which we can explain. If a client brings us a vehicle wondering about dry ice cleaning the underside, we give estimates on a case by case basis. Say we give an estimate of 12 hours; if that same customer was to clean the car on their own, using chemicals, a pressure washer, and scrubbing, we can guarantee it would take them much, much longer, maybe even 5 times as long to achieve a restored clean close to what we can do in 12 hours. (Yes, we literally mean 60+ hours when we say 5 times longer.) Not to mention, it doesn’t sound like much fun to stand under a car spraying water and chemicals all over everything and scrubbing areas over and over again…..as water and chemicals are dripping down your arms. It is much quicker than the alternative ways in cleaning an underside and other areas of vehicles, but not as quick as many people expect it to be. Keep in mind dry ice cleaning is a precise, detail driven process.

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Vehicle specific dry ice cleaning services are few and far between in the West Michigan area, and it’s important to understand the difference between a business with experience in precise, vehicle specific dry ice cleaning, and a business that a majority of the time deals with industrial dry ice cleaning. We are highly trained in how different vehicle surfaces respond to dry ice cleaning, from air pressure to ice particle size, with a goal of preserving vehicles. Alternatively, most of the time industrial dry ice cleaners work only with the goal of cleaning, rather than also preserving. Many are not used to using a range of machine settings on the fly. Oftentimes machines used in industrial dry ice cleaning are much less variable in particle size, and often do not run at lower air pressures. Many of the industrial machines use a fragmentizer in the gun that may or may not break dry ice particles up as they exit the gun. That is fine for cleaning large machinery, but risky for cleaning vehicle components because it is not precise. Our machine produces a consistent supply of the pre-set, desired particle size, no guessing, or hoping that we get a good stream of safe and effective particles. 

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Keep in mind that dry ice cleaning vehicles is a very dirty process. We want to make that clear since many businesses offer mobile dry ice cleaning services. Many in the industry like to say that the process of cleaning is just moving dirt from one place to another. If a dry ice cleaner comes to your garage/workshop, you can be 100% certain that the dirt being removed from your vehicle will be all over everything (we mean everything) in your workshop, including the top side of the vehicle being cleaned. Not to mention, most mobile dry ice cleaners use large diesel powered compressors which are loud, not all use air dryers, and dry ice cleaning in an area quickly produces a dangerous build up of co2. Avoid all of that and bring your vehicle to us. We’ll take care of the dirt. Heck, we’ll even wash your vehicle when we’re done.

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We’ve really taken the time to be sure that the dry ice cleaning process that we follow is safe and effective for our clients' vehicles. With preservation in mind, we’ve gained lots of knowledge about the nuances of dry ice cleaning vehicles, and have made the investment in quality and necessary equipment. Our clients are continually impressed with the dry ice cleaning process that we offer, and the positive impact it has on special vehicles.