When people hear automatic car wash machine, they usually picture private cars moving through a tunnel or engineering vehicles waiting for a wash.
But last week we travelled from Qingdao to Jinan and came back with a story that crosses industry boundaries.
The customer runs a sizable seedling nursery. As the nursery upgraded its management, it ran into a small but stubborn problem: seedling tray bases and transfer vehicles kept carrying soil in and out. This affected the site environment, and there was concern about bringing field pests and diseases into the clean propagation area.
At first they looked for an off-the-shelf solution, but most wash equipment on the market is designed for specific vehicle types. Flat, complex seedling trays left areas that machines could not reach or clean thoroughly, and finding a fully suitable machine was difficult.
As a Qingdao Tianyi car wash machine factory, we usually deal with standardised washing needs. Rather than dismiss this unusual request, we took the team to walk the nursery.
We watched how trays moved in and out, noted where soil collected, and even crouched down to see the angle of the water jet. The answer did not require an entirely new machine. It needed some structural adjustments to the existing automatic wash platform for flat objects and stubborn mud.
After several rounds of review, we settled on a custom approach suited to the nursery. When the machine was test-run and the high-pressure water carried away the compacted soil, leaving the trays clean, the nursery manager said: “I didn’t think it would actually work.” That made the trip worthwhile.
Often, what limits innovation is not technology but imagination.