How to Wash Oversized Vehicles and RVs at Your Car Wash

If you are looking for ways to expand your car wash business, you should consider offering car wash and detailing services for oversized vehicles and RVs. There are many benefits of providing large vehicle car wash services.

You could even attract local businesses and wash delivery vehicles, semi-trucks, and other fleet vehicles. As a result, fleet accounts can be a significant boost to your revenues. Plus, you could gain added business from the employees of your fleet accounts when they bring in their personal vehicles for car washing services.

Depending on your car wash operation, you may need to make some modifications before you can market car wash services for oversized vehicles. For starters, you will need a car wash bay that has sufficient clearance.

If you do not have a car wash bay you can use, you can wash the oversized vehicles and RVs outdoors. Just make sure that there is plenty of room for the vehicles to enter and exit the car wash and account for the turning radius of larger vehicles.

How to Clean an RV and Oversized Vehicles

How to clean an RV and oversized vehicles is not much different from washing and detailing the other vehicles at your car wash, except that they are so much larger. As such, they can take longer to wash and detail. In addition, with RVs, you need to be careful when using pressurized wash wands around the windows and doors.

Step 1: Gather the appropriate car wash cleaning supplies and accessories.

You will need microfiber towels, wash mitts, wash brushes, detailing products, car wax, and other such things you’d need to wash cars. You will also need a stepladder to access the roof and top of oversized vehicles and RVs.

Step 2: Assign a team to wash RVs and oversized vehicles.

By having a team of three or four employees all working together, you can wash more RVs and oversized vehicles than having individual employees work on one at a time.

Step 3: Start with a pre-rinse.

Using a pressurized wash wand or garden nozzle, pre-rinse the vehicle to remove excess mud, dirt, and debris.

Step 4: Wash the oversized vehicle.

If your wash wand is connected to the wash system, switch over to the wash cycle. Otherwise, fill buckets with soapy water and wash the vehicle by hand.

Step 5: Rinse the oversized vehicle.

Rinse off all soap from the vehicle. Check to make sure you did not miss any areas of the vehicle. If you did, rewash those areas and rinse again.

Step 6: Clean the undercarriage on the vehicles.

Do not overlook washing the undercarriage on oversized vehicles, especially around wheel wells where there can be a lot of mud and dirt. Just be careful when using a pressurized wash wand not to spray water up the exhaust pipe or directly onto brake lines.

Step 7: Dry and detail the exterior of the oversized vehicle.

Using extra-large microfiber towels, dry off the vehicle to prevent water spots. Next, apply car wax to the exterior. Last, finish detailing by cleaning the wheels and applying Armor All to the tires.

Step 8: Clean and detail the interior of the oversized vehicle.

Cleaning and detailing the interior of RVs and oversized vehicles requires a portable vacuum cleaner with attachments, a floor mop, etc. Since RVs are basically tiny homes on wheels, you will need cleaning supplies as you would use at home.

For semi-trucks and other oversized vehicles, other than a portable vacuum cleaner, you will need cleaning and detailing supplies as you do for regular-sized vehicles.

Other Considerations

Offering RV and large vehicle car wash services at your car wash is a great way to increase your revenue. However, besides ensuring you have sufficient space to accommodate the larger vehicles, you also need to verify your drainage system will be able to handle the larger volumes of mud, dirt, debris, and water without flooding.

For all your car wash supplies, accessories, wash parts, vending products, and more at wholesale prices, please feel free to browse our online store or contact Superior Car Wash Supply at 800-554-9274 today!