A look at no touch carwash chemicals

Think no touch car washes are safer for your car? Have a look at this article which explains the dangers of just one of the many chemicals used in no touch commercial car washes.

A deadly rinse: The dangers of hydrofluoric acid

Do its cleaning virtues outweigh its many risks?
by: John Strachan, Associate Editor Professional Carwashing & Detailing

At Harvard University, lab workers aren't allowed near a container of hydrofluoric acid (HF) without donning rubber gloves, goggles, a face shield, rubber apron and a lab coat. Some just don't feel safe wearing anything less than a supplied-air protective suit.

An overreaction? Hardly, when you consider that an HF burn covering less than 2 percent of your body can kill you. And you probably won't even know you're in danger until it's too late.

Two years ago, a veteran New York City sanitation worker was killed when an unmarked plastic container of hydrofluoric acid burst as it was being compacted in a garbage truck. He was splashed slightly on his face and hands, and he breathed in the toxic fumes. He died hours later at a hospital emergency room.

Anyone with a chemical background who's worked around the stuff can tell immediately who's using HF in their pre-soak. They just look for the tell-tale etching of the concrete tunnel floor.

The brittle, discolored fingernails will give away any detailer who's been using an HF solution - without protective gloves - to clean wheels.

HF is not like other highly corrosive acids. Mix it with equal parts of water (as many overzealous operators do when cleaning bay walls), spill a little on your unprotected hand and you won't even feel any pain as it begins to burn through your skin, searching for the calcium in your bones.

Because of the fluorine's numbing effect, it could be a full day before you begin to notice that your soft tissue and bone are being eaten away by this toxic chemical that has two favorite sources of calcium - bones and concrete.

Breathe in just a small amount of that 50 percent solution and you'll be dead - killed by the fumes of a highly toxic chemical that car wash and detail shop operators across the country are liberally sloshing on bay walls, spritzing on dirty wheels and pumping into their pre-soak.

The ultimate rinse

When Bill Consolo warns about the dangers of hydrofluoric acid, you have to remind yourself that he is also one of its major proponents among carwash operators and suppliers for its ability to get cars clean, dry, streak-free and shiny.

"It's some very non-friendly stuff," says Consolo, president of Chief's Manufacturing and Equipment Co. in Cleveland, who uses HF in his own high-volume exterior-only wash and recommends it to the carwashes he supplies.

"But never as a pre-soak," he warns. "If you've got people back there in the tunnel, breathing that stuff in, you're looking at a lawsuit."

Instead, Consolo uses concentrated HF, drawn from a 55-gallon drum and run through a metering pump, as a pre-rinse. He swears by its ability to remove loose traces of foam polish wax, shine glass and chrome, reduce streaking and neutralize the pH on vehicles that have just been through an alkaline pre-soak and washed with reclaim water.

"We use an ounce - maybe 1-1/2 ounces - on each car, and it's going through a lot of equipment," says Consolo. "I'll put my hand right in there and show you, you couldn't even tell it wasn't just water coming through."

Because the solution is not under pressure, Consolo says, there is little danger to workers. "You just don't want the guys mixing it or doing anything with it," he says.

That includes maintenance on the equipment that carries the HF solution.

"If the pump breaks and I have to go in and take it apart, I'd certainly wear some protective gloves," he says. "But that isn't something an employee would be doing anyway. That's a job for management or maintenance people."

A pre-soak mainstay

Although Consolo warns against it, the use of hydrofluoric acid to boost the cleaning power of pre-soaks continues to grow - especially with the number of frictionless automatic washes popping up throughout the country.

Although specific numbers are not available, all chemical manufacturers contacted for this article report "growing pressure" to provide HF solutions to carwash operators.

Without the agitation or friction of brushes, cloth or other type of physical contact, many touchless operators feel that the only way to loosen road film is to use a pre-soak that has been spiked with a healthy dose of hydrofluoric acid.

HF does, after all, have a number of related industrial uses that make it ideal - in lesser concentrations - for carwashers and detailers:

Fulll-strength, it is used to etch glass. In a dilute solution, it removes acid rain spots from windshields and puts a showroom-like shine on glass.

 The electronics industry uses it to surgically clean printed circuits, semiconductors and other high-tech components. Detailers use it to clean and polish chrome and other bright metal parts, especially decorative wheels that have become pitted, corroded or caked with hard-to-remove brake dust.

 HF has long been a cleaning staple at commercial truck washes to get the bright metal parts on the "big rigs" clean and shiny.

"It's the only thing I know of that will clean the fiberglass walls inside most self serves and frictionless washes," says Jeff Rufner, laboratory manager for Warsaw Chemical Co. in Warsaw, IN.

Find another source

Notwithstanding its popularity, the world's largest producer of hydrofluoric acid would be just as happy if the carwash and detail industries would look elsewhere for cleaning products.

"Unless these are trained chemical professionals who understand the hazards and have protective clothing, we really don't want the business," says Tom Crane, director of communications for the specialty chemical division of Allied Signal in Morristown, NJ.

HF, which is created by treating calcium fluoride or fluorspar with sulfuric acid, was intended for industrial use only, says Crane. "It is corrosive, toxic and poisonous."

While the International Carwash Association (ICA) has taken no formal position on the use of HF, executive director Mark Thorsby says the association is still concerned about the safety of carwash employees and customers.

"If you insist on using it," says Thorsby, "use it safely and in the prescribed concentrations."

Even as some creative chemical suppliers begin to offer alternatives, HF continues to find its way into the list of ingredients for car care and even household cleaning products, although Crane says the home-products industry has been doing a good job of reducing its dependence on HF.

"You can hardly blame them," he says of HF's supporters. "Sometimes soap and water just doesn't do it."

Not everyone agrees. One detailing veteran suggests that some operators are relying too much on dangerous chemical technology to do the work they could accomplish a lot more safely with a little old-fashioned elbow grease.

"There is no good excuse to ever use a hazardous chemical," says Irene Bernardo, owner of Top of the Line Automobile Enhancement, a mail-order detailing supply business in Bonanza, AR. "Why would anyone want to work with a liquid that burns the skin, cannot be used without a mask, permanently stains paint, etches glass and destroys spray bottles?"

Wheel cleaners containing less-toxic phosphoric acid are a safer alternative, she says, along with specialized tools for cleaning hard-to-reach crevices in wheels, followed by metal and paint polishing chemicals to remove brake-dust buildup and oxidation.

Key to survival

For some carwash chemical manufacturers, however, hydrofluoric acid may be the key to survival.

Warsaw Chemical Co. has long manufactured an HF solution designed to clean carwash bay walls. But only recently - and reluctantly - did the company begin to add hydrofluoric acid to one of its pre-soaks.

"For a long time we hesitated to do it with products that would go directly on the car," says laboratory manager Rufner. "But because of customer demand we finally had to."

Now, one of Warsaw's concentrated pre-soaks gets an HF boost - no more than 5 percent, says Rufner - and operators generally dilute it 80-to-1 beyond that, making the dilution on the car less than 0.1 percent.

"I warn people that this stuff (HF) is nasty," says Rufner. "I wouldn't use it in my own wash if I were an operator."

Nevertheless, he says, if that's what operators demand, it is what the company will supply.

To educate users to the dangers of hydrofluoric acid, Warsaw packs the requisite Material Safety Data Sheet with its products that contain HF. For a substance as potentially deadly as hydrofluoric acid, it's the MSDS equivalent of War and Peace.

"It's probably one of the longest ones you'll find because it's got the strictest guidelines," says Rufner.

Taking a different tack

Lon Swinehart chuckles as he reads the dire safety warnings on an MSDS for a popular carwashing product containing hydrofluoric acid that is produced by a leading supplier to the industry.

"We all know these are scan-read at best," he says. "For most operators it's just something to keep on file in case the EPA or OSHA stops by."

The president of S/S Car Care in North Canton, OH, Swinehart heads a company that three years ago began removing HF, bifluorides and caustics from its pre-soaks, tire and wheel cleaners - gambling its future on a line of cleaning products developed through polymer technology.

The decision, he says, was prompted as much by fear as it was altruism.

"I got scared to death about liability," says Swinehart. "We're a small company, and this continual proliferation of HF and bifluorides in cleaning products is a time bomb in the back room, just waiting to explode."

Swinehart says that over the past five years operators have been relentlessly upping the ante for chemical manufacturers, pushing for continually higher concentrations of HF in all wheel and tire cleaners, pre-soaks and other cleaners.

"The mentality is that harsher is better," says Swinehart. "We're trying to get across the point that milder and safer is better."

The routine use of HF in the cleaning process just feeds the perception of a large segment of the population that carwashes are not safe for cars, Swinehart says.

"We're in an industry that tells people to get their cars washed to protect them from acid rain," he says. "So what are they doing? They're putting hydrofluoric acid on the damn cars."

Bud Abraham, who operates Detail Plus Car Appearance Systems in Portland, OR, says he's more concerned about the damage that HF-containing products can do to an unwitting employee of a carwash or detail shop.

"It's scary," says Abraham. "I think there are a lot of honestly ignorant detailers and carwash people out there that don't know the danger of it."

In what he describes as one of the most frightening experiences of his life, Abraham was working with a group of islanders to set up a detail shop in the Caribbean several years ago. While pressurizing a tank that contained HF, a hose popped off.

"My God, the stuff was flying all over and it was getting all over everybody and everything," he says. "They didn't know how dangerous this stuff was. I just started shooting those guys with a water hose."

The jury, meanwhile, is still out on Swinehart's decision to spend what he calls "a ton of money" to develop the new polymer-based products that he claims are the future of the carwash chemical industry.

The response by operators, he concedes, has been encouraging, but not overwhelming. "It isn't like people are beating a path to our door to buy as much of our product as we can manufacture," says Swinehart.

But Andras Nagy, the polymer chemist and Ph.D. he hired three years ago to develop the products, says it will take time to win converts.

"I would compare it to the days when people believed that food was good only when it was hot and spicy and salty," Nagy explains. "How many years did it take people to realize that you could cut back on salt, it was better for you and you could still enjoy your food?"