Now that a new year is here, it’s important to set up a calendar outlining your goals, appointments, and your maintenance tasks. As any successful carwash owner will tell you, a preventative maintenance schedule is imperative in that it not only keeps equipment running smoothly and efficiently, but also lessens the chance of equipment malfunctioning that can shut down a carwash and turn away customers.

This article offers up a preventative maintenance schedules for a conveyor, in-bay automatic, and self-serve carwash. The conveyor one was provided by Robert Andre, president of CarWash College. The in-bay automatic one was provided by David Mathews, a service manager at AUTEC, Inc. And the self-serve schedule was provided by the people at CustomKraft Industries, Inc.

We suggest cutting out each one and/or entering the noted tasks in your own calendar. To do the latter, Andre suggests creating a 30-day calendar and filling in the daily, weekly, and monthly tasks and then leaving enough space for a sign-off box that will include the initials of who completed.

“In addition to the 30-day calendar, an annual dry erase calendar can be helpful as well,” notes Andre. “Using the annual calendar, you can also plan a year’s worth of repairs and projects with some forecasting and scheduling.”

Andre also suggests creating an equipment log which includes every single piece of equipment used at the carwash. Then, document all service and repairs both scheduled and unscheduled, that are not included in the preventative maintenance schedule. Include the date, car volume since the repair was last performed, and whether the service was scheduled or unscheduled.

“Add notes, tools, required parts, part numbers used, vendors and the time it took perform the repair,” Andre says, and, “List potential causes if a repair was premature. This will help with scheduling future repairs to avoid downtime.”