The Best Dry Ice Cleaning Machine For Car Detailing
First, owning a dry ice machine won’t be for everybody. This way of cleaning a vehicle is for people who want to offer a premium car detailing service or for the car enthusiast like myself who has a bunch of vehicles and wants them to be dialed in. You could just be a person with a bunch of money and want something like this in your garage. Whatever it is or whoever you are, this cleaning method has been a magical experience for me and others who’ve ponied up and bought the ICS IC 022 Evo Dry Ice Cleaning System.
I’m a bit of a crazy person. Crazy in the sense that I’m obsessed with “the chase” and curating of great products, especially products like this that are functional and can turn a good thing into something extraordinary. Scott Ales, “The Dryceman,” who’s the owner and founder of YoungTimer (an automotive restoration service), took my 1996 Techno Violet E36 BMW M3 and completely transformed the undercarriage as well as the engine bay. When I bought this vehicle, I wanted it to be dialed in without sparing any costs.
Dry Ice Cleaning, What Is It Exactly?
I’m not a scientist or chemist. I have a degree in electrical engineering, so I’d like to think I can dissect information about a particular thing that’s new to me and know enough about it to be dangerous. I’m not claiming to be the Dry Ice guy; I’m the guy who uses dry ice and freaking loves it.
The dry ice cleaning process involves propelling pellets at high speeds to a surface - in this case, the undercarriage of a vehicle, engine bay, door jams, interior, wherever. Basically, any part of your car can be dry-iced and done safely. You may be thinking pellets propelled at anything will cause some kind of damage, but that’s not the case here. The dry ice pellets are soft and less dense than other methods of “blast-cleaning,” like if you are using sand or plastic pellets. To give context, I dry-iced my Porsche GT3RS and didn’t flinch.
This method of cleaning is really popular in commercial and manufacturing settings. For example, to clean food processing equipment. We (obsessed car cleaning people) now have access to this chemistry to dial in our vehicles. This process will never replace an electric pressure washer and me washing my car by hand, but the idea of deep cleaning my wheels, brakes, and calipers excites me.
The ICS IC 022 Evo Dry Ice Machine - It’s Perfect
In May of 2021, I had Scott come to the garage to demonstrate how the ICS IC 022 Evo dry ice blaster (machine) worked. I get super pumped whenever I have experts come and share their knowledge of a product. This information helps educate me and is an essential part of the product creation process here at OG and how I want to build a package/solution around it.
There’s so much to love about this machine, but one of the first things that stood out to me was how easy it is to move around the garage. Since it’s pneumatic, you won’t need a hose or an electrical cord; you’d just have an air hose connected. That’s it. Simple. Of course, you’ll need a compressor, but I’ll discuss that below. I like that I can wheel this puppy around on my tile flooring, which having Swisstrax makes it super easy to do.
A bigger machine with higher performance is undoubtedly the better choice for output, but I’m not running a dry ice detailing shop. I just want to touch up certain parts of my vehicle where: 1) I’m not making a mess, 2) It doesn’t require me to pull out a bunch of supplies, and 3) I can deep clean the areas of my car I can’t get to with my pressure washer. That’s the beauty in owning one of these.
Some things I’ve come to love about using a dry ice machine:
- Convenience. I can park this thing in the corner of my garage next to my rotary screw air compressor and use it as I need to without grabbing a bunch of tools to do 15-minutes of work. Having something like this with no moving parts makes it appealing to me. If I had to pull a bunch of stuff out of my cabinets just to get this thing up and running, I’d be disinterested - this is the primary reason I have a wall mounted pressure washing solution, so I can unwind my pressure washer hose from the hose reel, connect my spray gun and clean my darn car.
- Tackling the details. I know that every time I pull my car into the garage and want to do some deep cleaning (after hand washing), I can grab this thing and go to town getting into all the nooks and crannies. It’s really satisfying to get all the unseen areas that most people neglect when detailing their vehicles.
- Versatility. I’ve used this machine to clean my car, floor mats, tools, garage cabinets, heck… even the bathroom sink at OGHQ. There are so many different applications for using a unit like this one. You’re not limited to what you can do with it; I’m using it primarily for car cleaning, but you may find other uses for it that will be effective.
- It’s cool. I’m a sucker for this kind of “technology” - I like to have things that simplify my processes while having a cool factor. I get excited every time I walk into the garage and turn on my linear fixture lights and see this thing sitting in the corner ready for me to use. Scott warned me that owning this thing would be a disease; I find reasons to use it.
This will work with any air compressor we offer in the store. My 3HP FIAC did a good job keeping up. Now, if you’re humming away with this thing for 5-minutes straight, you’re going to run out of air. If you’re doing a setup similar to this one, you’ll want to be mindful of that; you’d be working in smaller sections for a few minutes then letting off this thing. Now, if you’re tackling a bigger job and need more runtime, you’d want at least a 10HP compressor, which is what I have now in my new garage.
If you need assistance setting this up, you can reach out to my support guys at support.obsessedgarage.com and they’ll get you squared away.
The Cost
The cost for this machine is dramatically less than what you’d pay for a commercial-size unit, which can run you $100,000 and would take up a ton of space. You’d need the $50,000 dry ice machine along with a 40-horse air compressor, desiccant air dryer, 3-phase power or diesel to make it all work well. It can get quite pricey.
At the time of writing this, the ICS IC 022 Evo is priced at around $9,000 down from the original price of $10,000 when we released it on our site June 2021. This is something that existed only in Slovakia and Scott found it. A common thing between him and I, curating products; not just accepting what’s available or easily accessible.
I don’t expect to find this in every garage in the world; I expect to see it in the garages of those individuals like me who are car enthusiasts and want to dial in their vehicles. If you’re frowning at the cost of this unit then this isn’t for you and that’s okay. But, I’m telling you, once you’ve experienced having this in your possession and see what it can do, you’re going to fall in love with it. No cleaning agent or machinery I’ve used in my lifetime of detailing cars can touch what this thing can do.
The Specs
Dimensions
- Length: 528 mm
- Dry ice: to 24 kg/h
- Height: 336 mm
Consumption
- Dry ice: to 24 kg/h
- Compressed air: 0,8 m³/min. depending on the nozzle type and blast gun (29-116 PSI)
Weight
- Empty machine: 19 kg with the hose and blast gun
Operating Pressure
- 2 – 8 bar (29-116 PSI
Hopper capacity
- 4kg
ISO 8573-1:2010 [1:4:1]
- 0,1 mg/m³ Particles Class: 1
- DTP 3°C Water Class 4
- 0,01 mg/m³ Class 1 oil 1
Material
- Casing: Fibreglass, Wheel frame: Stainless steel
Noise level
- 65-85 dB(A) depending on the blasting pressure and the cleaned surface
Compressed Air Supply
- NW 7.2 coupling, acc. ISO 4414/EN 983 standard