Water Wizard 2.0 Touchfree Automatic

Anyone with experience with this product please post your thoughts....thanks!

----- from jim coleman website ----

Every Water Wizard 2.0 touchfree automatic is loaded with standard features. It includes most of the customer requested features and then some. Every unit is equipped with Undercarriage and Rocker Panel Sprayers. The undercarriage provides a high pressure under the vehicle wash. It can be on or off during any wash cycle.

The On Board Rocker Panel Sprayers thoroughly clean the wheels, tires, and lower part of the vehicle with controlled efficiency.

Water Wizard 2.0 Wash BoomThe specially designed wash boom with high impact, zero degree oscillating nozzles will rotate and attack the dirt on the front and rear of the vehicle. An additional Bug Pass can be programmed, front and rear, to provide extra cleaning when seasonal changes require it.
On Board Rocker Panel Blasters

LED Scrolling Signage

On-board Rocker Panel Blasters thoroughly clean the target area, front to rear.

The brightly lit LED scrolling sign and Enter Now/Please Wait bay entrance sign are in constant communication with the customer in the bay and the person next in line.

We have had extremely satisfying experiences with this machine and the Jim Coleman Company. We installed a fully loaded Water Wizard 2.0 approximately 14 months ago and have had to make only one service call. Our customer has given us nothing but positive feedback.

I've owned two for a few months. I have also owned four first generation wizards. The 2.0 was a generally all good improvement, with a couple of exceptions.

Overall, I feel from cleaning capability is is one of the best touchless units on the market. Use the right cleaning products and you can turn out great looking cars. The profiling option helps clean hoods of vehicles. I just wished it would profile both the leading and trailing edges of the car. Right now, it does not go back down.

Customer perception is great. The osillating nozzles rock SUVs and the customer perceives much more impact than other units that don't provide that sensation.

On Board tire cleaner/rocker panel cleaners will help give you the advantage over the many autos out there that don't adequately address customer's wheels. Of course,it's important to use the right product.

I replaced two inverted L's and have heard nothing but positive comments from the customers. I admit I prefer the clean look of inverted L's with no floor rails but the customer ultimately decides what they like better, and they vote with their pocketbooks. Revenues have been climbing since the water wizards have been installed.

Downsides: this unit is relatively slow. The quickest wash (four pass) is about 3:15. My top package (ten passes plus dryer) is over eight minutes when you include entrance time and dryer exit time. I would like to speed this wash up a bit but don't feel comfortable at this point doing that because of certain issue when I reduce passes. I can thoretically do about 10.3 cars per hour out of one unit with my packages if current purchase percentages stay the same. This would rise signifigantly if I changed the dryer arrangement where one customer could dry while another was entering, probably to 12 CPH. But I have a very short auto bay and this is not really practical. I will say that this unit has much more "action" than others, and as a result provides more "entertainment", so perceived time inside the wash seems shorter. It's just when a customer is waiting is when they become aware of how slow these units are.

Programming is very clumsy compared to a vector. But there is much more the wizard monitors and controls such as boom down time, and once we get the machines dialed in we really don'tmess with them much. So this is a minor issue.

Reliability at this point has been dissapointing. My units have been "buggy" but I hope they might be smoothing out. I predict maintenance will be higher on this unit than many others because of the large number of optical sensors on the unit required to profile vehicles. I also wish some components were of higher quality. There are plastic check valves and "brand X" high pressure hose on the unit. I paid quite a bit for a hot wax option, and was pretty dissapointed to see that the wax arch was made of PVC instead of stainless.

One final thought. In the past six months I had a chance to experience both Colemans' and Belanger's factory tech support, Belanger's support is MUCH better than Coleman. When you call Coleman Tech Support, there seems to be at least a decent chance that you will be placed in voice mail. If problems get a little tricky they may have to "get back with you", which is not good when your unit is down. The true factory expert on this machine does not work in tech support and does not usually take calls from the public. If you buy a water wizard, you need to either have a certain level of technical skill, or have a good local distributor with good technical skills. Coleman's warranty return policy caused my distributor to be very reluctant to change components in an attempt to solve an intermittant problem, extending the time we had to tolerate it several days. But enough of the bad stuff.

Bottom line, if these units get the bugs shaken out (and it looks like they are),I'll be very happy with my purchse. I know my customers already are.

Anyone want to start a topic on the worst IBA's on the market?