Which automatic car wash machine fits your site?

You add capacity — you do not upgrade the machine. A rollover's cycle rate is its ceiling, so a second bay with a second machine is the usual answer, and it also gives you a working bay on the day one machine is down.

Plan for it at the layout stage: leave the slab, the drain and the plant-room space for bay two even if you only build bay one. That costs very little now and a great deal later. If you are already confident the volume is coming, price a conveyor alongside and compare the two on paper.

It can settle it outright. A conveyor loads at one end and discharges at the other, so it needs a plot a car can drive through. A rollover works that way too, and that is the better configuration — a queue can form on the entry side while the bay clears, and payment can be taken at the mouth.

But a rollover will also work where the car has to reverse out the way it came in. That costs cycle time because reversing and queueing share one lane, it needs a marshal every open hour, and it rules out payment at the bay mouth. Scale plans of both are on car wash business layouts.

For a rollover, 5 to 10 square metres (50 to 100 square feet) is enough. For a conveyor, allow 15 square metres (150 square feet) as a minimum, and more as the tunnel lengthens and the arch count rises.

The difference is where the chemistry lives. A rollover carries most of its concentrate tanks on the machine itself; a conveyor puts every dosing pump and concentrate in the room. Either way the room also holds the air compressor, the water pumps, centralised vacuum, chemicals, spares and tools, and on a full-service site a washer and dryer for the microfibre — and every item needs to stay reachable for maintenance and replacement. Where the temperature drops below freezing, the chemical drums come inside too.

No. The machine tracks each vehicle's position while it is inside the wash bay and switches the conveyor motor off once the car has left the bay area, so a quiet hour does not cost you electricity.

KKE conveyors also run rollers on demand: a roller rises above the belt surface only when there is a car to push, and otherwise travels below it. That is what stops a roller coming up under a rear wheel and jamming.

There is no conveyor. A drive-through uses many of the same arches, but a person drives the car slowly through the bay while the machine senses it and starts each arch in turn. That makes the driver part of the equipment: they have to understand both the machine and the particular car.

It suits a dealership, where the drivers are your own, trained on that marque, and few enough to train properly. Many sites hand-prewash the car before it enters, to take the stubborn dirt and bugs off in one go. The system is the Z10 fleet car wash, and it can be tied to RFID so fleet cleaning is monitored from anywhere.

On a rollover, roughly four to seven minutes — which is what 8 to 15 cars an hour works out to. Where in that band you land is decided by the programme the customer picks.

A basic programme is about pre-wash, soap, a brush pass and drying. The extras bundled into the higher-priced programmes each add time: under-chassis wash, lava foam, triple foam wax, sealer wax and tyre shine. On a conveyor the question changes shape, because the car never stops — the wash lasts as long as the tunnel takes to travel.

Our usual recommendation is brush equipment with high-pressure add-ons, running the high-pressure passes before the brush pass so the loose mud is off the car first. That gives you friction's cleaning power on baked-on soil without the bristles working through a layer of dust.

Where nothing may touch the paint — a dealership handover, a coated or wrapped car — touch-free is the right answer, and we build that too. It is a fit question, not a quality one.

One person can operate the machine. But the business needs more hands: someone has to bring the cars in and park them, treat the dirty spots by hand, finish the car, and look after the customer and the cash.

It still runs on a fraction of the manpower a hand wash needs. Staff for the business, not just the machine — and staff for your busiest hour, not your average day. As cars an hour go up, put another hand on the bay.

That depends on what leaves the site. A car wash discharges soapy water carrying a light film of oil or grease, off wheel bearings and the occasional leaking engine.

Put in a water recycling system and it separates the oil and takes the sludge out before anything is discharged — and because the same water goes round again, the total your site draws falls. KKE biodegradable chemicals are the other half of it.