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Best Offboard dryers

D

Dustinw

New member
I am looking at buying a really run down site that has some off board dryers. I will be replacing 2 automatics and really working on the site itself so any sort of money I can save I will need to. One of the touch free units has stand alone dryers so I will keep those until they fail. I hope that last a while but if that don't what does everyone recommend? I will more than likely purchase off of carwashconsignment. While I try to revive the wash.
 
Superior / Dryer pros

My stand alone Superior blowers have been nearly trouble free for 20 years. I replaced one oscillate motor and had a loose wire on a contactor once.
 
Waxman said:
Superior / Dryer pros

My stand alone Superior blowers have been nearly trouble free for 20 years. I replaced one oscillate motor and had a loose wire on a contactor once.
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No one made a better dryer than Superior. Which eventually was reborn as Dryer Pros. Unfortunately the company closed up shop when the owner Archie passed away a few years ago. It’d sure be nice if another company could buy their designs and start producing blowers again to their specifications and quality. I also have 4 sites with Superior dryers that are between 15-20 years and still running strong. I also am looking at needing new dryers for another site and am also curious who makes the best at this point for IBA’s
 
Belanger air cannons are good. They are expensive new so not an option for a penny pincher. But you can find them used on Facebook groups occasionally.
 
Maybe consider a Ryko OHD? I have them and originally thought about replacing them with a 6x15hp Premier setup but in the end decided to run them longer.

I get a consistently dryer car than any of my competitors.
 
Belanger is good, but pricey as stated before. But there a lot of them if you keep an eye on car wash consignment.
 
WashieCarWash said:
Can you share why not? I actually need new dryers and Premier was a top contender just based on price.
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This is based on a purchase I made in 2019. I do not know if they have changed since then, but I will share my experience.
I've had several lines on my IBAs- McNeil, sonny's,Belanger, international, and premier. In my opinion, Premier is WAY behind on perceived flow and perceived drying performance. At the one site I have premier, I have a 25 year old Belanger arch with 3-10hp air cannons next to it. I bought 3-10s premier to hopefully match drying performance. This difference in performance was huge and easily noticeable. Even the IBA sales rep acknowledged the difference after seeing the cars coming out of the the two. In an effort to increase performance of the premiers I spent several thousand more on trunks, nozzle extenders, and finally added a fourth 10hp blower in an effort to match the performance of the air cannons. The belanger 3-10s still outperform the 4-10 premiers with trunks and extenders, but the difference is less noticeable.

Now in all honesty I priced air cannons a couple a years ago and was "blown away" by the price quote. It was probably twice as much as a premier setup. But more motors mean a longer startup delay and higher installation costs. But just don't buy 3-10s from premier and expect decent performance when that is what you can get with some other lines.

But again in the interest of fairness if I was going to use premier again I would price it with four 15s and it still may be cheaper than 3-10s from belanger. That is the way I would quote it. That would likely give me good performance. And they may have improved their design somewhat in five years.
 
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Greg Pack said:
This is based on a purchase I made in 2019. I do not know if they have changed since then, but I will share my experience.
I've had several lines on my IBAs- McNeil, sonny's,Belanger, international, and premier. In my opinion, Premier is WAY behind on perceived flow and perceived drying performance. At the one site I have premier, I have a 25 year old Belanger arch with 3-10hp air cannons next to it. I bought 3-10s premier to match drying performance. This difference in performance was huge and easily noticeable. Even the IBA sales rep acknowledged the difference after seeing the comparison between the two. In an effort to increase performance I spent several thousand more on trunks, nozzle extenders, and finally added a fourth 10hp blower in an effort to match the performance of the air cannons. The belanger 3-10s still outperform the 4-10 premiers with trunks and extenders, but the difference is less noticeable.

Now in all honesty I priced air cannons a couple a years ago and was "blown away" by the price quote. It was probably twice as much. But more motors mean a longer startup delay and higher installation costs. But just don't buy 3-10s and expect decent performance when that is what you can get with some other lines.

But again in the interest of fairness if I was going to use premier again I would price it with four 15s and it still may be cheaper than 3-10s from belanger. That is the way I would quote it. That would likely give me good performance. And they may have improved their design somewhat in five years.
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Thank you for taking the time to share your experience.

With Premier, I was considering two 15hp blowers on the top, with two 15hp elephant trunk blowers. Without any discounts, it about $10k less than Sonnys. Maybe I should just eat the cost and go with Sonnys, since that’s what all the PE groups are using - and reading about your experience.
 
For side dryers I really like my Mammoth dryers from Sonnys. I added these to a location that had 3 10hp Ryko dyers with moving nozzles. The mammoth side dryers really provided a much better dry and with in a year I noticed that several of the local tunnels had copied me and put them in also even though they already had 90 HP worth of drying.
 
I recommend checking out Twin City Fan and New York Blower. They both are industrial fan manufacturers with real engineering departments (they can provide you with fan curves for comparing speed, air volume, and HP needs) offering car wash dryers. Some carwash manufactures source their dryers from these guys, example Peco dryers are from Twin City Fan. I have Twin City 10 hp dryers that outperform my Premier 15 HP by a noticeable amount.
 
WashieCarWash said:
What specific issues did you have that makes it not worth the discounted price?
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If buying used dryers as original poster mention understand that Premier made an impeller design change in 2019. This was in response to impeller failures. Weld failures would result in the impeller exploding. They do offer an impeller replacement program but the details of this program are mysterious. I have never received answers to my questions submitted to their sales department regarding the redesign. I share these questions as I feel these are good questions a buyer from any manufacture might benefit from. If you happen to have answers to any of these. I would appreciate you sharing

  • New impeller design post 2019 manufacture date
    • What failure testing was conducted and what was the result?
    • Was this designed in conjunction with fluid dynamic modeling and FMEA analysis?
    • Was this designed / engineered in house or was an engineering partner involved?
  • Pre 2019 manufacture date impellers
    • What failure testing was conducted and what was the result?
    • Was this designed in conjunction with fluid dynamic modeling and FMEA analysis?
    • Was this designed / engineered in house or was an engineering partner involved?
  • Was a service bulletin or recall issued from Premier to their end users and distribution partners regarding pre 2019 manufacture date failures?
  • What was identified as the root cause failure mode for the pre 2019 impeller design?
  • Does Premier do their own in-house engineering and design work? If not, do you have a design engineering partner, if so who?
  • What is Premier's balancing procedure and method?
  • Please detail the quality control process, including weld analysis?
  • Please detail the impeller replacement program?
 
WashieCarWash said:
Thank you for taking the time to share your experience.

With Premier, I was considering two 15hp blowers on the top, with two 15hp elephant trunk blowers. Without any discounts, it about $10k less than Sonnys. Maybe I should just eat the cost and go with Sonnys, since that’s what all the PE groups are using - and reading about your experience.
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10K is small in the scheme of things. I've considered replacing my premier setup several times. A good dryer setup will outlive your IBAs.
 
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