Alpha Details · For the trade

What a detail actually costs you — chemicals, and the machine in your hand

We run a detailing studio and a PPF bay in Heidelberg West, and we sell the chemistry we use. So we can do something most suppliers can't: show you what a job actually costs per car, across four brands, using published dilution ratios and current Australian prices. Some of the results do not favour the expensive option — and we have left those in.

Why nobody publishes this number

Search for what it costs to detail a car and you will find hundreds of pages telling you what to charge. You will find almost nothing telling you what it costs. The reason is structural rather than sinister. Manufacturers publish dilution ratios but not prices. Retailers publish prices but have never used the product on a customer's car. Detailers know what they spend but have no reason to publish their margins.

We sit in all three positions at once. We detail cars and install film for a living, we hold a chemistry degree, and we stock the products. That combination is the only reason this can be written honestly — and it is also why we are going to show you results that cost us money, because a cost table that always recommends the dearest product is not a cost table, it is an advertisement.

How do you work out cost per car?

Cost per car is not the price on the bottle. It is the price of the concentrate you actually consume, and consumption is decided by the dilution ratio — which is why buying on shelf price gets this wrong so consistently.

The formula is simple enough to do in your head. Take the price per litre of concentrate, divide by the dilution ratio plus one, and you have the price per litre of working solution. Multiply by how much working solution the job uses.

A worked example, because the abstraction hides how dramatic this gets. Semper is a hyper-concentrated pH-neutral shampoo that dilutes at 1:1500. A 4.5-litre container at A$207.90 is A$46.20 per litre of concentrate. At 1:1500 that makes roughly 6,754 litres of ready-to-use shampoo — just over three cents a litre.

Six and a half millilitres in a ten-litre bucket. About a teaspoon. If you have been mentally budgeting a few dollars a car for shampoo, you have been out by a factor of ten.

What does a three-pH wash actually cost in chemicals?

Here is a full decontamination wash costed line by line — alkaline pre-wash through a foam cannon, acid decon foam through the same cannon, then a neutral contact wash. Prices are per use on trade-size pricing.

Drop the pre-wash to 1:20 on a lightly soiled car and the total falls to A$6.72. The ratio is a lever you control, and on a maintenance customer it is the right one to pull — over-concentrating an alkaline pre-wash buys nothing but a faster-emptying drum.

Which brand is actually cheapest per car?

That first table uses one brand because a three-pH system is a matched set. But most of your consumption is not a matched set — it is an all-purpose cleaner, an iron remover, a shampoo. So we ran the same arithmetic across the four ranges we stock, and the results are not consistent.

All-purpose cleaner, per litre of working solution, at a comparable general-cleaning dilution:

Surfex-HD is roughly three times cheaper per litre of working solution than Dùctile — and at its light-duty 1:100 ratio it drops to about twelve cents a litre. We stock both. We are telling you the cheaper one wins this comparison.

Iron removal goes the other way, and the reason is dilution. Three of these four are ready to use. One is a concentrate.

The most expensive bottle on the shelf is the cheapest product on the panel, by a factor of nearly five. That is the entire thesis of this article in one row.

So the lesson is not "buy the premium brand" and it is not "buy the cheap one". It is that the answer changes product by product, and the only way to know is to divide.

Price is the floor, not the decision

Everything above gives you a cost floor. It does not give you an answer, and we would be doing you a disservice if we stopped here — because in our own studio we do not always reach for the cheapest option per litre, and we can tell you exactly why.

We only stock brands we use. There is nothing on our shelves we would talk a customer out of, because we would not have bought it in the first place. But we do have preferences, and they are not secret — ask us and you will get a straight answer about which one we would put on our own car and what would have to be true for us to choose the other.

When we advise, we are weighing three things, and the honest answer changes with all three. What the job actually requires — a neglected work ute and a coated weekend car are not the same brief. What the budget will carry, because there is no point specifying a product someone cannot restock next month. And the individual case in front of us: the substrate, the water hardness, whether the bay is enclosed, how much time the operator has. Change any one of those and the recommendation legitimately changes. Anyone who gives you the same answer regardless is selling, not advising.

Take those four iron removers. All of them work by chelation — a thiol active binds ferrous particles into a water-soluble complex, which is the purple bleed running down the panel. On price per litre they finish in a clear order. On suitability they do not finish in that order at all, and here is what actually separates them, from each manufacturer's own published data:

Not one of those differences shows up in a price-per-litre column. A product that stays wet on a 35-degree day is worth more than one that saves you four dollars and flashes off before it has finished reacting. A low-odour formulation is worth real money if you work in a closed shed. That is the sort of thing you only learn by using them.

The other factors that never make it into a spreadsheet are certification and behaviour. VDA testing on the Labocosmetica pre-washes is independent material-compatibility work against paint, alloys, trim, PPF and rubber — that is a liability argument, not a cleaning one, and on a customer's car liability is worth paying for. Rheology decides whether a product sits where you sprayed it or runs off a vertical panel. Colour indication tells you when the reaction has finished, which stops you rinsing early or letting it dry. None of it divides neatly.

And a lot of what we know did not come from a data sheet. We are lucky enough to have customers and trade contacts who tell us what is working and what is not — the tips, the failures, the "try it at half that ratio" corrections that come back from people using this gear every day. That feedback loop is genuinely the most valuable thing we have, and it keeps changing what we recommend. If you find something that contradicts what is on this page, we want to hear it.

One honest complication: not everyone measures the same way

Comparing pre-washes is harder than comparing APCs, and it is worth knowing why before you try.

Bilt Hamber quote a Panel Impact Ratio — the concentration actually landing on the paint, typically 0.5–2% for Touch-Less and 1–5% for Auto-Foam. Most other brands quote a reservoir ratio, which is what you mix in the foam cannon bottle before the pressure washer dilutes it again on the way out.

Those two numbers are not interchangeable, and converting between them requires knowing your machine's actual draw. Anyone who converts one to the other without measuring their own setup is guessing. If you want the real figure for your pressure washer, we built a dilution chart and calculator for exactly that — it walks through the bucket test that measures your throughput in about five minutes.

What percentage of a detailing job is product cost?

Set the chemistry number against a real ticket. A decontamination wash at A$150 carries about A$8 of chemistry — a shade over five per cent.

So chemistry is not the lever on your margin, and this is the most useful sentence in this article. If a job is not making money, buying cheaper product will not fix it, because you are optimising five per cent of the ticket. The variables that matter are how long the car is on the bay, how much of that time is rework, and whether the price reflects the hours.

It also reframes what "expensive product" means. The gap between a premium pre-wash and a budget one, per car, is often two or three dollars. If the premium product saves fifteen minutes of agitation, or removes the risk of marking a customer's trim, it has repaid itself several times on one vehicle. Chemistry is cheap. Your time and your liability are not.

Is an expensive polishing machine worth it?

Here is where detailers lose the most money, and it is the mirror image of the shampoo mistake. We watch people save two hundred dollars on a polisher and pay for it every week for five years.

There are two separate reasons a better machine costs less to own, and they are usually blurred together into one vague claim. They deserve separating, because only one of them is about speed.

The first is throughput. A larger throw covers more panel per pass, and a machine with genuine torque does not bog down and stall when you lean into a stubborn area — which is the moment cheap DAs stop cutting and start polishing air. That is where the time actually goes. It is a function of throw, power delivery and balance, not of vibration.

The second is vibration, and it is not a comfort feature. It is an occupational health exposure. Prolonged hand-transmitted vibration causes hand-arm vibration syndrome — the early signs are tingling and numbness in the fingers after using vibrating tools. Australia does not currently have a legally binding workplace exposure standard for hand-arm vibration; Safe Work Australia's guidance says so explicitly and instead points to the widely used reference values of 2.5 m/s² A(8) as an action value and 5.0 m/s² A(8) as a limit value, with measurement under AS ISO 5349.1 and 5349.2. Your general duty to manage the risk under work health and safety law applies regardless.

We are not going to tell you that a better polisher saves you hours because it vibrates less. That is two claims welded into one and the join is weak. What lower vibration buys you is endurance and consistency — the fourth and fifth cars of the day finishing to the same standard as the first — and it buys you not developing a permanent injury in your thirties. What buys you the actual hours is throw and torque. Both arguments point at the same machine. They are just different arguments, and a supplier who runs them together is hoping you do not look closely.

Then do the payback sum, which takes ten seconds. Divide the price difference by your hourly rate multiplied by the hours saved per car. At A$120 an hour, a machine that saves ten minutes a car repays a A$200 premium in ten cars, and a A$700 premium in thirty-five. For anyone detailing full time, both are inside a couple of months — and everything after that is margin, on top of arms that still work at fifty.

We stock the Dynabrade forced-rotation DA, the DIY Detail Correction Pro cordless in 15mm and 21mm, and the Mirka cordless 77mm for tight work. We are not going to pretend those are the only good machines made. What we will say is that we chose them by using them on customers' cars, and we will give you the honest comparison against whatever you are considering, including when the answer is that your current machine is fine.

Is it worth buying the trade size?

The last thing that falls out of this arithmetic is container size. Below is the real difference between our small and trade sizes, per litre of concentrate, at current retail.

The honest caveat is shelf life and cash flow. A ten-litre drum of something you use twice a year is not a saving, it is money on a shelf. Take the size step on what you genuinely go through — for most detailers the pre-wash, the shampoo, the APC and the interior cleaner, which is conveniently where four of the five largest savings sit.

How to redo this for your own studio

Measure once, properly, on one car. Fill your cannon and buckets with a measuring jug rather than by eye and write the volumes down. Almost everyone we have done this with is surprised, usually because the cannon holds more than they thought.

Work out price per litre of concentrate, not per bottle. That is the only number that compares a 500ml bottle against a ten-litre drum honestly.

Divide by the ratio plus one, multiply by your measured volume. That is your cost per car for that product. Do it for the five products in your core process and you will have a cost floor for every service you sell, in about twenty minutes.

Then leave it alone. Recheck when prices move or your process changes. It is not a number that needs monthly attention — it is a number you need once, so every pricing decision after it is made with your eyes open.