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Where do you wash off after off-road?


Lewis

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Where do the rest of you wash off after going off-road?

I've been washing off on my driveway at home so far, but it takes a lot of water firstly to wash the car off, then to wash down the drive, and now more recently to wash the road down afterwards

After this months playday the 90 was especially dirty, my jet washer packed up halfway through washing and then it went dark, I did my best to wash down the road, but the next morning the neighbours were round at 7:30 to complain. And rightly so - it looked like a truck had shed its load of sand in the road, it took two of us a further 2 hours and countless liters of water to make good. Not something I want to repeat

I can't carry on as I am, and I really don't want to become a nuisance neighbour, so what are the options?

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I drive through the water when offroading to get most of it. If it's a play site I use their washer if available otherwise I have a petrol washer I take with me and dunk the hose in the lake at the site. Failing that there's a bit of waste land at my work where I can wash off without bothering anyone.

I've washed the tow car and trailer at home before, I emptied a 200litre water butt just on the tow car and it took ages to clean the road so I can certainly empathise!

What would be cool would be to build a jet wash trailer with an ibc on and a petrol washer. You could connect it to your house guttering to fill up then take it to the offroad site or a piece of waste land to wash off. If you have some offroad friends you could split the cost and share it? You could even fill it from a pond if it hadn't been raining. Just put some filters on it on both the pressure washer and gutter otherwise it can turn into a sand blaster.

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Here at Team Idris it is a game of many stages :huh:

First off is get in with gloves and remove as much clay as possible on site. Then in with the petrol pressure washer to remove more using two five gallon drums or the Dragon wagon's 100 litre camper-van tank (if we take that rather than Disco2 or Jeep tow motor). That gets it respectable to take on the road and not get in-secure-load. Then finish off at home by making a right mess. Which is why I'm thinking of washing off on a big plastic sheet. Then I can roll the mess up :D

But I'll always have all the bits that dry and fall off in the garage I guess :(

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i park my disco and its lorry on a farm. i reverse my lorry next to the tap by its parking space. i then reverse the discovery off the back till just the front wheels are on the deck. i then take my petrol pressure washer and blow all the carp off the underside. i then drive it back on, park the lorry in its space and sweep the sludge into the hedge.

job jobbed.

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We normally take a 205litre drum and a petrol pressure washer to wash the trialer but when I need to wash my 90 i go to the local BP garage in the car, buy £10 worth of tokens then wash the 90 off at 7am before I go to work. More recently I've used the local drive in car was that has 10 polish cleaners. They will wash it for £10 and they filled a wheel barrow 3 times on the last occasion!

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That is madness!

While it sounds a great idea on the face of it, how many have a battery/charge system that could cope with even 10 mins of running the winch motor for the briefest of washes?

I hope the motor would be water cooled too, cos they do get hot when run continuously!

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coin op car wash, I meant to clean the mud from the floor after but ran out of coins, £5 just to blast the worst clay off the chassis. The guy in the transit who had waited for 10-15 mins drove off when he saw the pile of mud I left there.

Needless to say i'm probably not welcome back there. Got a nilfisk pressure washer when they were on offer, so use that now, but I don't go quite as extreme off roading any more.

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Load should be less on the winch motor than doing a 12000lb pull, so wouldn't think it would get THAT hot at that current draw... but of course would be interesting to see the duty cycle on it.

But comparing to to a Karcher of similar pressure and water throughput, 300l/h and 110BAR, they are 1400W, so in this case with engine running, 100A, so most trucks would have an alternator just about able to keep up with that :)

Going to be pretty pathetic in all honesty though, compared to a professional pressure washer that is.

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