PDQ M5 - Double washing cars before they exit

[ScottV]

I've been having a problem with my M5 and hoped that some of you might have already experienced / solved this.

During the final dry pass, the exit door is programmed to open when the bridge see's the middle flag. Once the dry pass is completed the machine tells the vehicle to leave the bay. On an intermittent basis, if the car doesn't leave quickly (within 10 seconds), the exit door will start to close and the machine washes the vehicle again.

Usually the person sitting at the pay station calls me to tell me that the person in the bay just got their wash that they have paid for! It's an intermittent problem but one that ticks off the customer and makes the one inside the bay wonder if they will ever get out!

I've had my distributor tech look at the problem and he couldnt come up with any diagnosis. remedies. We looked into the programming of the M5 and didnt see where anything could have been changed to cause this problem. I'm not sure if the machine uses the ultrasonics to see the car leave the bay, the door eyes, or what?

Any ideas / solutions would be appreciated.

Scott V

 

[ProCarWashes]

bay

You might look t the bay length. If its set at long, change to short or short to long. See if that will fix it.

 

[PDQ Support]

Double wash info

The only thing I can think of is has to do with the door eyes:
1). Wired wrong
2). Door eyes are bad
3). Door eyes are positioned in direct sunlight (causing bad readings.)

If you have the latest version of software (2.01.00), the doors should not close until it sees the exit eyes blocked, then unblocked. We wouldn’t load the next vehicle until we thought the first vehicle left, so the side US are probably positioned more towards the entrance door. (So I’m assuming the “intermittent” portion has more to do with “Smaller vehicles.”)

My thoughts are check the exit door eyes, or move the side US so that even small vehicles are blocking them.

Another thing that could help is increasing your close delay setting on the exit door. If the door eyes are flickering, we would wait longer before actually closing the door, and if the eyes were to get blocked before this time expired, we would keep the doors open and reset the timer.

 

[ScottV]

OK, I appreciate the ideas. I guess if the doors were wired wrong, this problem would have cropped up 4 years ago. They eye's might be bad, and we can check that, however the tech was watching a status screen on the PC while a car was being washed and the signals from the door eyes corresponded to what was happening in the bay. WHen the car drove through the eyes the 0 became an X.

BTW...what does "side US" stand for?? Are they the boxes on the side walls that measure the width?

ScottV

 

[PDQ Support]

"Side US" stands for the side ultrasonic sensors. These are responsible for the initial width measurement of a vehicle. They also determine when a vehicle has left at the end of the wash.