For Golden Bay coating clients
Your Ceramic Coating Owner’s Manual
This is the maintenance schedule we promised you — bookmark it. Follow it and the coating keeps beading for its full rated life — and any written warranty on it stays alive.
A coating only ever asks for the right kind of wash — this page shows you exactly what that means.
The whole schedule, at a glance
Three habits. That’s genuinely all a coating asks of you.
Weekly (recommended)
A safe wash
Hand wash with pH-neutral soap, a rinseless wash at the curb, or touchless when you're stuck. Never a brush tunnel — it voids the warranty.
As it happens
Spot care
Bird droppings, sap, hard-water spots — get them off within a day or two, before they bond to the coating.
Once a year · required
The Ceramic Maintenance Detail
$250 sedan / $300 SUV — the clay-bar decon + inspection that unclogs the coating and keeps your written warranty active.
The rules that matter
Do
Hand wash with pH-neutral soap
A dedicated pH-neutral car shampoo, soft mitt, two buckets. This is the coating's happy place.
Rinseless wash at the curb
No driveway, no hose, no problem — P&S Absolute Rinseless or Optimum No Rinse and a stack of towels. Full walkthrough below.
Touchless wash in a pinch
A touchless automatic (spray-only, no brushes) is fine when you need one. Hand wash is still better.
Dry with a clean plush towel
Never let the car air-dry — water dries into mineral spots, and baked-in spots are what dull a coating between details.
Deal with droppings and sap fast
Bird droppings, sap, and road tar bond if they sit. Rinse or wipe them off within a day or two.
Ceramic booster every few months
Optional but worth it: a spray-on ceramic topper as a drying aid restores beading and slickness.
Don’t
Brush tunnel washes — ever
Those spinning brushes carry every previous car's grit. One tunnel run puts wash scratches in a coating that took 4–6 hours of careful work to install.
Dish soap
It strips protective layers, not just dirt. If the bottle lives under a sink, it doesn't touch the car.
Harsh or acidic wheel cleaners
Strong acid and alkaline cleaners degrade the coating. pH-neutral products everywhere.
Wax on top of the coating
Wax won't bond to the slick surface and can mask the coating's hydrophobics. Use a ceramic booster instead.
Dirty towels back on the paint
A dropped or spent towel is done. Grit trapped in microfiber is how swirls happen.
Letting water dry in the sun
Wash in the shade or early morning. A warm panel bakes minerals into spots a normal wash can't remove.
The safe wash, step by step
Two ways to do it right: the classic two-bucket wash if you have a driveway and a hose, or the rinseless method if you park on the street. Check steps off as you go — your progress saves on this device.
- Knock off loose grit with water pressure before anything touches the paint. Most wash scratches come from skipping this.
- One with pH-neutral car shampoo and water, one with plain clean water for rinsing your mitt. Grit guards at the bottom if you have them.
- Soft microfiber mitt, light straight passes. Roof and glass first, dirty lower panels and rockers last — they carry the most grit.
- Dunk it in the clean-water bucket after every panel so you're not dragging the last panel's grit across the next one.
- Flood the car top-down. On a coated car the water will sheet off and take most of the dirt with it.
- Plush microfiber drying towel or a filtered blower. Water dries into mineral spots fast on a warm panel, and baked-in spots are what dull a coating between details.
- Rinseless is for normal road film and dust. If the car is caked in mud or heavy grit, it's not a rinseless day — use a touchless wash or a full rinse first.
- A couple of gallons of water in a bucket with P&S Absolute Rinseless(opens in a new tab) or Optimum No Rinse (ONR)(opens in a new tab), diluted per the bottle. Soak 5–6 plush microfiber towels in it.
- Pull a towel out, wring it lightly, and wipe the panel in straight lines with almost no pressure — the solution does the work. Top of the car first.
- Each towel has eight usable faces. Once a face has picked up dirt, fold to a clean one — and once a towel is spent, it goes in the dirty pile, never back in the bucket.
- Follow each panel immediately with a separate dry microfiber towel so nothing air-dries on the coating.
- Their own towel, which never touches paint again. Brake dust is exactly the iron contamination the annual decon exists to remove — don't wipe it onto the coating.
0 of 6 steps
The one most owners skip
Once a year: the decontamination wash
A coating repels contamination — it doesn’t make it vanish. Over a year, iron particles from brake dust, industrial fallout, and hard-water minerals bond on top of the coating and slowly clog its pores. A normal wash can’t pull them off. You’ll feel it before you see it: clean paint that’s gritty under your fingertips, and beading that’s gone lazy.
The fix is a clay-bar decontamination wash: iron remover plus fine detailing clay with plenty of lubricant, stripping everything back so the coating can breathe and bead like the day it went on. Once a year does it for most cars — park hard by a freeway or on the coast and it may want it sooner.
The yearly one is with us: the Ceramic Maintenance Detail — $250 sedan / $300 SUV — because it’s also your warranty inspection: we decon, check every panel under lighting, and write up the coating’s condition. That report keeps your written warranty active. Comfortable claying between visits yourself? Fine by us.
Set the reminder once, forget it forever
Tell us when the coating went on and we’ll build you a repeating calendar event — every year on that date, with a heads-up a week before. Works with Apple, Google, and Outlook calendars.
This page is your maintenance schedule
Every Golden Bay coating carries a written warranty registered to your car, and it assumes the coating is maintained. This page is the maintenance schedule: follow it — plus the yearly Ceramic Maintenance Detail — and the warranty stays alive.
Regular washes are yours to do however you like: DIY with this page, or our optional monthly maintenance details from $149. The one visit that must be with us is the yearly inspection — $250 sedan / $300 SUV — because its written report is your warranty record.
Freshly coated? The 48-hour spotless check applies as always — find anything we missed in the first two days and we come back free.
Quick answers
Questions about your coating?
Text us a photo and a question — we’ll give you a straight answer, usually within 5–15 minutes during business hours.