The solar-powered waste paper based mobile car-wash will literally blow your mind! It is tiny, and it uses tiny amounts of water and leaves no waste.
Designed and manufactured by the ever-creative Charles Jane (CJ), a researcher at the National University of Lesotho (NUL), CJ Carwash cleans your car wherever it is. In your garage, office or mall parking lots; just about anywhere. It is driven by a little secret.
It uses tiny amounts of water and leaves no dirty water on the floor!
“With a body that is made from completely recycled waste newspapers and cardboard, the innovative mobile car-wash uses a small fraction of water compared to the water-drinking normal car-washes,” Jane introduced his interesting design.
Yet it cleans just as effectively. As if that is not enough, it is on wheels. So it comes to you where you are within Maseru City.”
The tiny car-wash has amazing features that makes it what it is. It uses very little water, released with enough pressure to make effective cleaning. The liquid water moves out as if it is a steam from a sprayer. The small quantities of water ensure that it doesn’t spill to the ground before it is wiped off. You wash and rinse without a drop on the floor.
Let’s say you are in the Central Business District (CBD), “khubung ea teropo”. And let’s say you want to do shopping at the mall while at the same time you realise you need to wash your car which has been dirty for quite some sometime.
You realise that there are no car washes nearby. Maseru car washes are placed at the outskirts of the city. Even if you go there, you are going to spend long hours waiting for other cars to be done. You know that you might spend an hour or two, the time you just don’t have.
Now your job is simple.
You just park your car wherever you conveniently can. Let’s say it is a mall parking lot. Then you make a WhatsApp call to CJ Carwash which stations itself, ever-ready, at the middle of the city among street vendors. When the car wash shows up, you get into the mall and do the shopping.
When you come back, you are a bit surprised at the good job done by the tiny mobile car wash. Of course you realise, as Mark Twain once said, that “it’s not the size of the dog in the fight. It’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
Under normal circumstances, the mall management would not allow a car wash on its parking lot but, boy, oh boy, is this a different car wash! With this car wash, you don’t see any waste on the floor. It is designed such that all dirt is collected and carried away after cleaning. So everyone is happy.
The same can be said about calling CJ Carwash to your work. You place your car in your work’s parking lot and place a call. And, of course, the same thing can be done right in your garage at home. No need to move your car away from the garage.
The washing process goes like this. Shampoo is first drawn through pipes from a special container that comes with the car wash. It is then sprayed nicely all over the car to arrest the dirt. There are no spills on the floor… remember?
Then another sprayer, which also uses pipes, draws from a different container. This container has water. CJ Carwash comes with two 20 Litre (L) tanks. One 20 L tank contains fresh water. When it is full, it can wash four cars before being refilled. The other 20 L tank picks all the dirty water used for washing the four cars.
“We can do whatever we like with this waste water,” Jane said, ”In this era of droughts and global warming, we may choose to irrigate some plants in the city instead of throwing it off.”
The clean water is used for both washing and, later, rinsing. In both washing and rinsing, the water is arrested with a soft cloth and squeezed into the 20 L dirt water tank well before it can reach the ground.
In the end, you use 12 times less water than your normal car wash.
“We then use our solar powered vacuum cleaner to power our hovering system which removes dust in the car interior,” Jane said. “It uses very little energy plus the solar keeps charging all day long. We never run out of energy.”
How do they clean the tricky wheels’ “armpits”, (ka mahafing)? “First, we gently scratch the mud that often piles therein. Then we spray the water with a collector below. In that case, we still don’t have water spilling on the floor,” Jane said.
“As a bonus, we come with the lowest prices in town,” he concluded. “We have a price for washing the outside of your car and another for washing the whole car, the interior included.”no