THINGS I'VE LEARNED
TRYING TO GET RICH

William M. Pitzer

President of Amalgamated Enterprises, Inc. Retired. Owned a 5 & 1 in Richland, WA from 1981-1999
Operates the AUTOCAREFORUM.COM

email pitzerwm@owt.com

I learned that you could do just about anything you set your mind to. In 1992 I started thinking that I needed to add an Automatic to remain competitive and maybe prevent someone from building another car wash near me. To justify this investment which was right at $100K, I decided that with a 7% return on my investment and repayment in 3 years would be okay. That worked out to 550 cars per month/19 per day with an average price of $5.60. Everyone I talked to said "no problem"!! Turned out I averaged 10 cars per day.

I did my research and decided on a Powerain. The biggest factor was that I wasn't locked into buying all of the repair parts from them. I could get the parts "on the street". They are located in Minnesota and I was in SE Washington. There was no distributor anywhere near me so the choice was to pay someone from the factory to come out to install it or do it myself. I have always thought that if someone else can do this then so can I.

I had a metal Butler building, six bays with an equipment room in the middle. The bay dimension was 16' by 25'. I'm in the freeze zone so I needed doors. I also wanted a free standing dryer, so I needed to add 15 feet onto the existing bay. I decided on bay 3, being next to the equipment room, thus a shorter run for water and electricity. Powerain has its pumping station on board. I needed to upgrade to 3-phase power with more amps and change my water meter from ¾" to 1 ½". In Oct. 93, I started. I had an architect draw the bay expansion, because I didn't want problems with the city. We decided to add 5' to the front and 10' to the back, but before the city okayed the plan, I realized that it would be a lot less work to add the total 15' to the back. One other little thing was when I got the plans back from the city there was so much red on them I thought someone had bled to death on them. Another problem was that when I went to buy the steel I was told that what the architect has called for was only made in 2 places on the planet and it was double in cost. I got the next size up of a different brand and saved quite a bit of money.

To put in the 3-phase I needed to dig a trench 200' across my lot and down the alley to a transformer box. Lay 4' PVC and pull in the wire. I rented an asphalt saw and cut the asphalt. Originally I had decided to put the free standing dryer out front, so I cut 25' in the front so that I could run power to it. The next day I rented a small backhoe. I had never operated one before so you can imagine how funny it must have been watching. About 2' down I ran into another old asphalt and since the little backhoe wouldn't break it up, I had to run down and rent a jackhammer to break that up. The reason I decided to cut the asphalt was so patching it would be easier, but I was so bad with the backhoe that I busted up more than I wanted to. With a $5 per hour helper I got the pipe in and covered back up before anyone fell in. Bear in mind that my idea was to be able to keep the wash open as much as possible. The next part was to have the wire pulled in and not realizing that I could have pulled it in as I laid the pipe I hired an electrical contractor and they showed up with 3 men and 2 trucks, $1000 later the wire was pulled. I installed all of the electrical panels and boxes myself.

I had ordered the unit to arrive Feb. 4 or so. We had a pretty fair winter so I was working on the extension of the bay. I had to cut the asphalt for a new pad, of course the person that built the wash had sloped the lot into the bays. So I had to mess with that so the pads were at the right slope but without a lip. The bay heat had not been done very well. I wanted the new ones in these pads to be perfect, so I spent a lot of time laying it out. I also didn't want the pad to crack so I used lots of wire. I did hire the flat work done by a professional. The extension required new 8" I-beams, so I laid everything out on the ground and cut holes so I could bolt everything together and to the building. I did the welding myself, with that wire fed unit you buy at Costco, it went pretty well. I had done another pretty bright thing. I had bought a 16' flatbed truck with stake sides. That enabled me to pick up the steel and leave it in the truck while I assembled the new part. I didn't have an easy way to rent a forklift to lift the steel into place so I rented a 500-pound man lift. It is really designed to lift kitchen cabinets into place. To put the first framework up I called a couple of friends and at 10 PM we were jacking the I-beams into place. It was a little scary 15' in the air on ladders with this 15' x 8" I-beam on the man lift swaying in the breeze. By midnight the frame was up and a couple of crossbeams were c-clamped to keep it from falling down. The next day I added the supporting beams and built the openings for the garage doors. I'll tell you, that man lift is a great tool. It is like a car jack with a 2'x2' platform to hold stuff. Part of the problem with renting a forklift is that I had no idea what I was doing and was engineering as I went, and like I said there wasn't a rental place in our town.

On Feb. 3rd, it was raining cats & dogs and was cold, but I wanted the skin on before the unit came so I could secure it. So in the rain and later snow another $5 per hour guy and I was screwing on the roof and the walls. Installing the doors was a snap, I use air actuators to raise and lower them. I also installed a 100K BTU radiant heater to keep the unit operating when it's below freezing.

Now the fun began, my bay was sloped to the center trough and the rails need to be level. I could not drill into the floor because I didn't know where the bay heat was. I tried a metal detector and every other idea I heard. My solution was to pour a 12" wide curb for the rail. Another small problem was that nothing of the original building was square, so lining up the rail was fun. I don't like drilling and using bolts so I used j-bolts. That was a mistake. A year later I talked WR in Vegas, into putting one in. He used 12" sono tubes making islands. That was the correct way to go. I used a small roller car jack and a pallet jack to get the gantry onto the track. To change over to the 3-phase everything had to be inspected by the State, so I hired the electrical contractor as a consultant. He would drop by and tell me what to do and what not to do.

I finally was ready for the inspection and got red tagged. I told her that "Cory" had supervised the job. Turns out that "Cory" had been the inspector's teacher, and she said he was wrong so I had to redo a few things. There were a number of visits by the inspector and finally, the city came and cut over the new power from the old, I then had to tie in the old single phase to the new panels. I had planned that pretty well and was only down about 4 hours. I didn't want the inspector to have to check everything with the new unit because our State requires everything to have a UL sticker. So I told her that other than the motors everything was low voltage. Eventually she signed off on everything. Then I was able to finish the rest of the installation.

Another change that needed to be done was a decision to move the freestanding dryer to the end of the Automatic. It was pointed out that in the front, a piece of sand or something could be blown into someone's eye, and then I would have a problem. During this time my friends would come by and just shake their heads. They thought I'd lost my mind. Another operator that is about 5 miles away was installing a different Automatic at the same time and was having it done by a distributor. The actual install time took me 2 ½ months, his took 3 months and nothing went right. He would come by and just bitch that he was paying about $40K for his installation. I had never laid block before so installing the ACW was a fun experience. It did come out level and pretty square. Here's a problem too, the instructions tell you to mount it at a certain height, but the differences in cars and trucks make that measurement a problem so you drive a number of different sizes up and use an average. One smart thing I did was to run a 4" PVC out to the ACW. With the front facing the west the inside really gets hot and with the 4" pipe, I solved most of that by connecting a good size blower inside the equipment room to force cool air into it.

Since I had one of the first Powerain systems and I do not like to be at the mercy of a manufacture 2000 miles away. My unit was the first one that didn't have an attendant on site. If something went wrong the attendant would just hit the reset and restart the unit. I didn't want the attendant so I bought the software to communicate with the PLC and learned to program it. I made a few changes to the program, which of course worried Powerain. I did add a few features that they later added to newer units. I also put in a unit that would allow me to control the PLC from a cell phone. I had a direct dial phone on the front door. When a customer would call with a problem I could start the Automatic and give them a free wash. The Automatic would also call me if there were a problem. Reading this you might think what an idiot, but look at it this way. I saved about $40K, that's $40K that I don't have to remake. My competitor spent the $40K and had more problems than I. If I had been making lease payments or a bank loan, I could have lost it all. The fact that I needed 19 cars a day to get my investment back and only had 10; another $40K and it would have been a disaster. Another benefit is that I lost 25 pounds, which I needed to lose. I also know everything about the unit, so repairs are quick and cheaper. Would I do it again? Probably. I was also able to help WR with his installation. His was a piece of cake, he already had the 3-phase and enough water and he is a contractor.

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