soapy
Senior Member
Carwash operators must be a different breed of people compared to most in the world today. We buy our new equipment with the hopes that it will last a long time with a low service cost. Most of our equipment is similar in nature with the exception of the electronic controls that are the brains of the system. The people that make the brains of systems come from the computer world where it is common place to just scrap a computer or controller after a year or 2 of use. Car wash operators are more of a throw back to the older generation who appreciates quality that last a long time. Several times over the years when attempting to upgrade a particular piece of electronics I have found that a simple upgrade is not availible without a COMPLETE upgrade of all electronics. Naturally the companies want to sell the highest dollar option there is even though a simple upgrade would serve our purpose.
I recently decided that I wanted to start vending vac tokens for my automatic wash purchasers. It should be a simple thing I thought. Each time a wash is selected and electronic pulse is sent to the car wash to trigger a wash. Simply use this signal to trigger a token coin vend out of some kind of hopper. What I found is that the cheapset way to do it is with a $1600 token vendor. THe ACW company I use assured me that they had a token vendor that would work with my ACWS. I bit the bullet and bought 2 of them for one location to try. I got them all mounted and was ready to hook up the wires only to find out that my old controllers would not work if they were older than 2007. It would take an additional $1200 per acw to make my new token dispensers work. Why did they neglect to tell me this upfront? SO now I have had to spend $5600 just to give something away. I wonder how many acws have been sold since 2007 in this economic climate compared to all the ones sold the previous 20 years. Don't the companies think the market would be much bigger for this kind of thing for the older units if they made a simpler design that would work with the older acws at a lower cost?
Car wash operators like to keep things working without replacing things completly all the time. Too many time the suppliers have to grand of idea for a wholesale change when they could sell alot more by just listening to the current operators. Seems like they only care about selling complete new systems when the market could be huge if they provided smaller solutions that could be added to current equipment.
I recently decided that I wanted to start vending vac tokens for my automatic wash purchasers. It should be a simple thing I thought. Each time a wash is selected and electronic pulse is sent to the car wash to trigger a wash. Simply use this signal to trigger a token coin vend out of some kind of hopper. What I found is that the cheapset way to do it is with a $1600 token vendor. THe ACW company I use assured me that they had a token vendor that would work with my ACWS. I bit the bullet and bought 2 of them for one location to try. I got them all mounted and was ready to hook up the wires only to find out that my old controllers would not work if they were older than 2007. It would take an additional $1200 per acw to make my new token dispensers work. Why did they neglect to tell me this upfront? SO now I have had to spend $5600 just to give something away. I wonder how many acws have been sold since 2007 in this economic climate compared to all the ones sold the previous 20 years. Don't the companies think the market would be much bigger for this kind of thing for the older units if they made a simpler design that would work with the older acws at a lower cost?
Car wash operators like to keep things working without replacing things completly all the time. Too many time the suppliers have to grand of idea for a wholesale change when they could sell alot more by just listening to the current operators. Seems like they only care about selling complete new systems when the market could be huge if they provided smaller solutions that could be added to current equipment.
