With flowers and trees in bloom, chances are that your car gets a new layer of pollen every day. Beyond being incredibly annoying, pollen, dirt, bird poop, and other contaminants can ruin your car’s paint job if they’re left to sit too long. While it’s more convenient to take the easy route and drive your car through a carwash, it's our opinion that you should never, ever, at any time, take your vehicle to a carwash.

Traditional carwashes — the ones with those massive brushes — rarely, or ever, get cleaned. So, all the rocks and dirt that the bristles remove are then flung onto your car. Even if the bristles are cleaned every month, which is highly unlikely, the bristles are doing more damage to your car’s paint job than anything else.

Instead, you should wash your car at home. Even if you don’t go full expert mode where you try to follow a YouTube tutorial, spending a few minutes doing a car wash at home will net you far better results than a carwash.

Carwashes with brushes are brutal on your car’s paint job because they can hold on to debris and dirt cleaned off of other cars. Cleaning the brushes is a difficult task that carwash owners often overlook. Taking your car through one of these machines could result in deep scratches, dings, and swirl marks.

If you’re really in a pinch, brushless carwashes are a much better alternative, since they don’t have anything that physically touches your car. Instead, they blast your car with water and soap at high pressure. One major downside of brushless carwashes is the water. You don’t know for sure if the water that the machine is using has been filtered or if it’s the same stuff that’s left over from other vehicles.

Plus, if you’re willing to shell out money for a service that simply blasts your car with water and soap, why not do that with a car wash at home?

We’ve all seen those videos of YouTube detailers painstakingly agonizing over every millimeter of a car to get it as clean as possible. While the videos are fun to watch, even if it’s just to kill some time, this isn't the real world. Not everyone has the time, money, or space to spend hours cleaning a car. We get it.

You don’t have to be an expert or have 10 hours of free time to wash a car by hand. You also don’t have to have tons of equipment that takes up half of your garage or basement to store. Remember, this is a simple car wash to get most of the debris and grime off of your vehicle. This isn't the time to get grime out of every nook and cranny.

Before you get any of your products ready, find a good spot to wash your car. Washing your car in direct sunlight will cause the water to evaporate quickly, leaving water spots and forcing you to use a lot more water than you would normally have to. It will also force you to work quickly with products that can dry oddly and leave streaks, which is what you don’t want.

Step 1: Park your car in the shade out of direct sunlight.

Step 2: If you don’t have access to a shady spot, wash your car on a cloudy day.

Once you've found a good spot, the next step is to start hosing off your car.

Step 1: Start hosing off your car by the wheels and wheel wells.

Step 2: Spray your tire cleaner onto your tires and let it sit while you hose down the rest of the car.

Step 3: Hose the top of the vehicle and work your way down.

If you have a nozzle, find a setting that knocks off the most debris and focus on the dirtiest areas, like the front bumper and lower parts of the car.

Step 4: After you hose down the car, return to the wheels and hose off the cleaner.

If you have a wheel brush, scrub the wheels before rinsing the cleaner off.

With your fully wet, you want to get your two buckets ready for the wash.

Step 1: Fill one of the buckets with clean water and a dirt trap.

Step 2: Fill the second bucket with clean water, car soap, a wash mitt, and a dirt trap.

Step 3: Get your wash mitt nice and frothy and start cleaning your car from the top down.

Step 4: Wash the car in sections and rinse the sections as you go so the soap doesn’t dry.

After you’re done cleaning each section, squeeze out as much water and dirt from your wash mitt as possible before dunking it into the clean water bucket, which is now the dirty water bucket.

Step 5: Dip the wash mitt into the soapy bucket and start cleaning another section of the car.

Step 6: Complete the process again until the entire car is clean.

Step 7: Once it's clean, hose it off one more time for good measure to ensure you got every bit of soap off the car.

With the car washed, now you have to dry it.

Step 1: In a rush? Try drying your car with a leaf blower. Start at the top to get the water flowing downward before focusing on specific sections.

Step 2: Don't have a leaf blower? Grab your drying towels.

Step 3: Work as quickly as possible to get most of the water off the vehicle.

Step 4: Return with clean drying towels to work on sections of the car, focusing on working quickly to reduce water spots.

If that's all the time you have, then your car wash is done! Using a high-quality soap with built-in wax means you can skip the wax part of the wash and rest assured knowing your car’s paint job is protected.

For people with some extra time and some wax on hand, now is the time to wax your car. We recommend using a spray-on car wax that’s much quicker than a traditional carnauba wax.

Step 1: Spray or apply the wax onto a section of the car and buff it off with a clean towel.

Step 2: Add tire shine to the tires and spread and buff on plastic exterior parts.

Step 3: If you're going to spend the time to wax your car, why not show your car's interior some love? You'll be surprised at how good your car's interior will look by simply cleaning your car's mats.

There you have it! A car wash at home doesn’t have to be an all-day task, and it doesn’t require hundreds of dollars of products. Depending on the size of your vehicle and how fast you work, you can finish a quick wash in as little as 30 minutes. Even if you decide to wash a car by hand and go as quickly as possible, you’re going to end up with better results than you would by taking your car through a carwash. Once you realize how easy it is to wash your car at home, the idea of visiting a carwash will never cross your mind — similar to checking your car's brake fluid.

For colder months, you can use these same steps to get the salt and winter grime off your car, but instead of washing your car at home, you can take all of your equipment to a self-carwash with a high-pressure hand washer. Whatever you do, don’t you dare think about using those awful hand-held brushes, which certainly never get cleaned. Your car deserves better.

The Essential Guide for MenThe Manual is simple — we show men how to live a life that is more engaged. As our name implies, we offer a suite of expert guides on a wide range of topics, including fashion, food, drink, travel, and grooming. We don’t boss you around; we’re simply here to bring authenticity and understanding to all that enriches our lives as men on a daily basis.