Valero

This is not what you’d expect to see for a do it yourself Carwash. It’s not a drive up booth with a machine, it is just a machine on the side of a gas station. When I got there, there was a man sitting and waiting for people go drive up for the Carwash that was rather insistent on cleaning my vehicle for me, for a fee of course. I quickly told him that I’d rather do it myself, and he continued to be friendly. When I put my $ 5 in the machine, the water pressure starts instantly like you’d expect. What you don’t expect is for the broken high pressure spray hose, to spray you when it comes on. The high pressure spray hose also did not have any soap, wax, spot free shine formula or anything other than very cold water (in the middle of Oct). After I found out that I couldn’t use that function to blast off some of the bugs and dirt before the foaming brush, as you’d normally do and expect, I switched to the «foaming brush». The «foaming» brush in this case does not foam. It does though spew a red liquid soap with a heavy cherry scent. Since it wasn’t a warm foam coming out to clean my vehicle, but a cold red liquid soap, it was very messy and got on my clothes when I tried to use some elbow grease to scrub my truck (which really was not that bad). The end result was, I was out $ 5, my truck was still dirty and I had to take it somewhere else to be washed. I will NOT be coming here again.

This is for the car wash machine. I put in a $ 5 bill and it gave me over ten minutes to go through all of the cycles to wash the exterior of my car (soap, foaming brush, rinse, wax, rinse). The brushes were very high powered and by the end the ware was beading on my car and it was looking great!

I thought there were no self-​serve car washes in the District, but then I happened to go past this place. It’s mainly a gas station and convenience store, but along the side of the building it has a vending machine that’s really a mini car wash. For $ 2.00, you get 4 minutes or so of high-​pressure spray with the usual options — soap, rinse, wax, etc. No more need for a special trip to the ‘burbs just to pressure-​wash my bike!