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Boat soap or car soap?

Christian Williams

E381 - Los Angeles
Senior Moderator
Blogs Author
Why not use a car wash soap on a waxed boat? Much cheaper, and available at any supermarket.

Googling the topic shows various opinions, including the issue of biodegradation. Are marine soaps designed to biodegrade in salt water? Is the difference from car wash significant, or not?

Most car-wash products claim not to remove wax. They are often one-quarter the price of the shelf at West Marine.

Opinions? Data?
 

Shelman

Member III
Blogs Author
I use dawn dish soap... it takes the black diesel residue off the transom with one swipe. :)
 

mkollerjr

Member III
Blogs Author
We use about a cap full of Boat Zoap to wash our entire E38, so I don't think cost is much of an issue in the grand scheme of things.
 

toddster

Curator of Broken Parts
Blogs Author
Why not use a car wash soap on a waxed boat? Much cheaper, and available at any supermarket.

Googling the topic shows various opinions, including the issue of biodegradation. Are marine soaps designed to biodegrade in salt water? Is the difference from car wash significant, or not?

Most car-wash products claim not to remove wax. They are often one-quarter the price of the shelf at West Marine.

Opinions? Data?

I actually do the biodegradability testing on many of these products. Occasionally, they'll pay me to test in sea water, but usually not. I've never seen a case where it made a difference. But here't the thing: usually they have a whole line of these products. Car wash, boat wash, airplane wash, house wash, etc. But they are all too cheap to pay me to test each one individually. So they send one sample, along with a letter stating that all of these products are identical, except for the label, and they would like separate reports for fifteen products, for the price of testing one. :mad:

The "beauty products" companies do the same thing. They'll sell a woman five different bottles of stuff to use on different body parts, but the contents are all the same. Oh, and there was a company with "specialty lubricants" that did that too.
 

toddster

Curator of Broken Parts
Blogs Author
Not really. Detergents in general are pretty readily biodegradable. At high concentrations, they disrupt microbial cell membranes, so they won't deteriorate in the bottle. (I also use them as wasp and insect killers - they "wet" the cuticle through which insects breathe and basically drown them. Don't spill concentrated stuff directly on sea life.) The standardized tests all assume a wastewater concentration of 2 - 20 ppm, which isn't toxic to microbes. There isn't a lot of difference in consumer detergent products at that concentration. Some of the so-called "eco-friendly" ones degrade a little slower than regular ones, because they tend to load them up with more complex molecules and useless toxic stuff like "essential oils." Usually the difference isn't enough to call them on it. There are industrial detergents that degrade more slowly, but you won't find any of those in consumer products.
 
We have always used either dish washing liquid plus a small capful of bleach, or murphy's oil soap. incidentally it also works on cars.
 

Christian Williams

E381 - Los Angeles
Senior Moderator
Blogs Author
Around here a boat needs to be washed every week (no rain, fallout from LAX), and a wax job is $500. Dishwashing detergent strips wax.

I was just a West Marine this morning. Their proprietary product is $14. Starbrite is $20. Car wash, advertised not to strip wax, is $9 at CVS.

For me the question relates more to buying convenience, and not getting played like a yo-yo by marine product labeling.

Not a big deal, but I do go through a lot of boat wash.
 

Rick R.

Contributing Partner
Funnny, I never really thought about anything other than not getting in trouble. My dock neighbor is a gun-toting EPA agent. I guess anything labeled "boat" is not going to kill fish or degrade the rubber tires and plastic bags in the ocean. I always look for labels that say, "will not degrade shipping containers, tires, flotsam, jetsam, or damage that little rainbow you see when you overfill your fuel tank." Then I know it's worth buying.
 

toddster

Curator of Broken Parts
Blogs Author
I know about this from having to deal with box elder beetles. It works well for this and if you use one of those small hand pressurized sprayers you can really cover a good size area really quickly. It isn't uncommon to see thousands of these bugs in one big bug orgy. What about microplastic beads in these soaps?
Well oddly enough, I have been testing a lot of the microbeads. Never heArd of them before someone submitted a sample. The polyethylene ones of course, won't degrade without sun light. But there are a lot of newer ones made from waxes and hydrogenated oils that do biodegrade. One guy sent me some hand soap for kids with alginate beads that popped open and released blue dye. Kids were supposed to keep scrubbing until the blue went away I gave the unused sample to my nieces. They hated it
 
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