The biggest annoyance to car wash owners who have invested millions to buy a piece of property and build a car wash is to see mobile car wash operations and mobile auto detailers who compete with minimal investment. And they will do whatever they can to shut them down.

Their biggest tactic is to call the city code enforcement and the water quality control departments of environmental protection on these mobile operators. This has worked for a while. However now the mobile operators have figured out a way to collect their waste wash water affluent. Having been in the mobile car wash sector as the industry leader for a couple decades, we understand both sides of the issues. And we do not have a problem with storm water enforcement, EPA, RWQBs, NPDES agency permits, DEPs, or what ever they call themselves this week.

We run within the guidelines of their rules and are not concerned with future legislation since we are helping make the rules now and writing the BMPs for adoption in our industry. We have opened fixed site car washes as well and this works too as it allows for a place to dump the collected affluent water, wash towels, park trucks at night, help with our work load we cannot get to, and water factories for RO water. Plus we have found that very few mobile and fixed customers overlap anyway, and why be limited?

For the mobile car wash operator today, I advice that you buy a simple system to collect your wash water and have storm drain blockers to prevent the affluent from getting into the storm drain. Think on this in 2006.