Welcome to Detail Like a Pro Luxxio Series – Section Three

Interior Clean

You quickly vacuumed your interior and armed yourself with a decent multipurpose and glass microfiber cloth and are ready to clean. The next step is relatively easy spray some cleaner and go to town.  This however does come with some caviets.

What Interior cleaner should I use?

This question is not so much about what you should use as much as it is about what you shouldn’t use.  Many people jump to harsh chemicals, ammonia based cleaners or a multitude of other industrial options risk causing them health issues or causing their car damage.  The personal risk seems to go largely ignored by the consumer likely believing that if it doesn’t kill them today it must be ok. The damage to the interior is somewhat quicker so it often gets mitigated by spraying and promptly wiping the interior before the damage, bleaching, etc can occur.  This is a risky proposition but more so it is also a very suboptimal practice as most of the cleaning that happens is mechanical, not chemical.  You see in your car majority of the dirt (ignoring any stains that we will go deeper into in other sections) is either skincare products/makeup, dust or food/general hands grime, and in New Zealand sunblock.  All these things fall into largely the same category of compounds and can be dissolved for easy removal with the same safe chemicals removing the risk of damage or to your health and in most situations saving money due to cheaper cleaning solutions.

A second important step to interior cleaning is to focus on always doing chemical cleaning.  You should not be rubbing excessively to get something clean as that means that the solution you are using is not fit for the job and it additionally results in a risk of surface wear within your vehicle.   When we say chemical cleaning that is to be spraying your cleaner on leaving it there to dissolve the dirt and then wiping it away with a microfibre cloth where it will remain until the cloth is cleaned.   As this is not how many people have cleaned their cars over the years we find it takes a little while to break the habit of spraying and frantically wiping and get into the habit of the following routine:

1. Spray Area 1 with multi-purpose interior cleaner and wait.
2. When Area 1 is ready to have easy dirt removal with a microfibre Spray Area and dirt remove Area 1
3. At all times have 1 area ahead of the one getting dirt removed reacting and wet with the cleaner.

Once you get into this routine you will realize the job happens a lot quicker, the results are better and most importantly you don’t get anywhere as tired.

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