Water Shortages

Car Wash businesses are highly dependent on water usage and availability. Widespread drought in Southern and Western states in recent years has led to a greater desire among state and local elected officials to regulate water usage. In Virginia, a Dillon Rule state, the General Assembly has ceded some regulatory authority to local governments in an effort to give localities more tools to deal with drought conditions. There is some evidence that this trend will continue for the foreseeable future, which will result in greater variance in local water ordinances from locality to locality. This trend is adverse to car wash operators in a political environment where policy makers do not understand that car washes actually use less water than folks who wash their cars at home.

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Drought Conditions

As we are all well aware, there is a very serious drought condition affecting much of our region here in the Southeast. Out of our eleven state region, seven states are experiencing water shortages including North & South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and the panhandle of Florida.

Obviously, the number one reason for the drought is lack of rain. Some areas have seen little to no rain in over three months. This has a direct affect on the amount of days the lakes can supply water to the treatment facilities who then supply the communities.

Another significant reason the water supply is depleting is due to the major increase in both residential and commercial development. For example, in Raleigh N.C. an average of thirty thousand people per year are moving to the area. “The bottom line is we are using more water today than ever before with no new sources to draw from. The inflows and the discharges from the reservoirs are not equal” says Carl Howard, owner of Autobell car wash chain based in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Infrastructure and production capacity are issues, but not nearly as big as the lack of rain” adds Howard.

Some areas including Atlanta and Raleigh are reported to have less than a ninety day supply of available water if significant rain doesn’t come soon.

“In North Carolina, seventeen communities are in emergency stages, meaning they have less than a one hundred day supply of water remaining,” according to Dale Reynolds, owner of Carolina Pride Car Wash, Inc. in Roxboro, North Carolina.

Most municipalities have four stages of conservation measures with stages three and four being most restrictive on the public regarding water usage. When the higher stages are reached, the goal is to reduce usage by forty to fifty percent. Reynolds also notes that “most municipalities don’t take action fast enough” referring mainly to restricting lawn irrigation which uses up to thirty percent of what water is supplied to a community.

For example, proper irrigation of a lawn calls for one inch of water per week. If you properly irrigate a one acre lawn with one inch of water during a weeks’ time, you will have used twenty seven thousand gallons of water.

Obviously we are in the spotlight and viewed by the public as tremendous users and wasters of water. In reality there are a lot of other industries that use more water than us including textile and power plants, manufacturing facilities, bottling companies, hospitals, restaurants, etc. “A 2002 study in North Carolina revealed that all professional car washes combined used less than two tenths of one percent of the water supplied to the area” says Reynolds. “The main things an operator can do are to reclaim the used car wash water as well as the reject water from the reverse osmosis system.” adds Reynolds. “Through reclaim, we’ve been able to achieve twelve to fifteen gallons of water usage per car versus fifty to one hundred gallons per car without using reclaim,” says Howard.

As for what types of equipment use more or less water, “when using friction, the quality of water and amounts used is decreased versus touch free requiring higher quality water for chemical performance and higher quantity for high pressure performance.” says Reynolds who manufactures and distributes both.

With climatologists predicting a dry winter in the South, it’s more important now than ever before to take measures to conserve water and help make the car wash industry be viewed in the public’s eye as water conservers rather than wasters. We need for our industry to be treated equally with other industries that rely so heavily on water.

For more up to date information visit the U.S. drought monitor website at http://drought.unl.edu/dm.

This article was written by SECWA Director Pettey Hardin with special thanks to Dale Reynolds of Carolina Pride and Carl Howard of Autobell for their knowledge and experience pertaining to the drought.