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 WR
Zuraff, owns 2 carwashes in Las Vegas, Been in the business for 16 years.
WR has also been in the construction business building carwashes, apartments,
condos, houses and commercial buildings. Email at wrz@ix.netcom.com
There's not a lot of things that will bring a smile to a
self serve car wash owner's face on a gloomy overcast morning, with no
business, than the mention of "The Rig". That rather ominous looking,
white mechanical scorpion device pictured above is in reality a Ring "0"
Matic 500T and what we here at WR's Self Serve Car Wash most affectionately
refer to as "The Rig". The reason for this term of endearment is because
in the early half of the nineties, when the liberal montage of "tree hugging,
sap sucking, environmental whacko's" was in full bloom, the EPA all the
way down to it lowest tentacles in our local city, county and state governments
declared common ordinary pit sledge to be toxic, caustic, hazardous, down
right radio active waste until proven otherwise. Used to cost me any where
from $400 to $600 per location to have my pits pumped once a year by the
local septic tank, grease trap pumping companies. And the reason for that
seemingly excessive cost is because I'm such an environmentally friendly
guy. Yes, that's right! I mean I ain't no sap suck'n tree hugger or noth'n
like that, but the underground design of my sediment tanks was for the
facilitation and use of reclaim water at a self serve, no less. These
tanks are huge, four foot by eight foot and eight feet deep. There are
two of them at each location on either side of the equipment room,
one stepped down a foot lower than the other on the discharge
side and connected underground at the clear well sides with an eight inch
sewer line. This design produced the most volume of water at any one point
to be picked up and pumped to the filtration unit after sedimentation
for reclaim. This design also produces voluminous amounts of sediment
or pit sledge on sometimes even a biannual basics. After enactment of
the new EPA regulations regarding pit sledge about eight years ago, costs
of pit sledge disposal rocketed to stratospheric proportions. I won't
bore you with the quantum mathematics since that was discussed on a forum
thread earlier this month, but pumping costs were in the neighborhood
of $6,000 per location, per pumping session after that. A bottom line
breaker for even the fabulously wealthy self serve car wash operator's
like Kevin and Frank. Not wanting to wind up figuratively and financially
in the same hole as my pit sledge....going down the drain...[joke] Hey
what happened to that car wash operator? Oh, at 98 cents a gallon he went
down the drain with his pit sledge. :-) Something had to be done to cope
with the copious amounts of pit sledge......enter, "The Rig", we bought
one. We opted for this model for two reasons. One is that our tanks were
easily accessabe because of the diamond plate steel traffic cover design
as opposed to the manhole type and Two, easier to deal with solids rather
than liquid waste disposal. At the far end of one of my locations was
an area next to the dumpster, away from the rest of the car wash and suited
for construction of a drying pit.
The area with the protective temporary fence around it is
the drying pit.
The drying pit was constructed to emulate a loading dock
in reverse. This upside down mirror image hole in the ground is a concrete
monolithic pour with #4 rebar @ 12" O.C. each way bottom and sides, 6"
thick and water tight as a frogs anus. Excuse me, I mean holds water as
well as any swimming pool so there is no danger of seepage. Dimensions
are zero to 36" deep in 30'and 72" out to out to accommodate a 48" Bobcat
style front end loader or a brother with a square point shovel and a five
gallon bucket, which ever you have available. And that's not a racial
slur, I'm talking about my brother who happens to be quite good with a
bucket and shovel. Wait till it dries, have it tested and Uppsssie Daisy,
into the dumpster it goes. Well anyway, here is a picture of it.
The reason for the smile on a cloudy day as mentioned at
the beginning of this article is because as an ardent admirer of Benjamin
Franklin who said, "a penny saved is a penny earned", I really feel like
I dodged a bullet with this system. In five or six years now of cleaning
my pits this way, I have yet to have the results come back from any of
the local testing laboratories to suggest that pit sledge is anything
different from common ordinary dirt as you might expect to find on the
side of the road. Making money makes me laugh. Saving money makes me smile.
So when the clouds come out, looks like rain and the car wash is empty,
I get this big "pit eat'n" grin.........Ahhhh! The Rig! Let's hook it
up boys, and save six grand today!
Talk about Fun with a capital "F", I just don't know how
you could have more of it with your clothes on than this. The hardest
thing is to get the steel traffic covers off, but when I think about how
much money I'm saving, I'm smiling even when I do that too.
Just back the ole Rig up like soooo....................Extend
ye old boom into the pit like so
 
Dump in ye old drying pit like so...and remember to do
this with your clothes on or they will send you to the farm for having
too much fun. [funny farm, that is]
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