I first purchased Iron X Snow Soap about 3 years ago, as I was intrigued by the idea of being able to clean and decontaminate in one single step.
Iron X Snow Soap is marketed as a strong, pH neutral cleaner that can also remove iron contaminates at high concentrations. In theory, this means you will not need to follow up with regular Iron X after washing with Snow Soap.
In order to maximize the iron removing ability, CarPro recommends using the product undiluted in your foam lance. They recommend a 1:8 mixture (product:water) for light to medium iron removal, and just 1-3 ounces of product in a foam lance for general cleaning when iron removal is not a priority. It is also recommended that when working on heavily contaminated vehicles you should still use traditional Iron X after washing to remove all of the iron particles, regardless of how you dilute the snow soap.
Using the product undiluted means you will likely use about 1/2 of the bottle (500 mL) per vehicle, which equates to roughly $14/wash. In my opinion this is quite a high product cost for saving just a few minutes of your time. We have not tested the iron removal abilities in this undiluted form as I do not plan to use the product in this manner due to the high cost per use.
The recommendation for light to medium iron removal (1:8 dilution) does not specify whether the dilution is for use in a foam lance or if it is for use in a bucket for hand washing. A foam lance reservoir is about 32 oz, meaning you would use 3-4 ounces of product, which is what was recommended for general cleaning without iron removal, so that did not seem right to me. If used in a bucket, 1:8 mixture with 2 gallons of water would equate to roughly 28 ounces of shampoo, or nearly an entire bottle of Iron X Snow Soap, which also did not seem right. The 1:8 recommendation is a bit unclear, so I cannot weigh in on the performance at this mixture either.
After considering all of the options, it did not seem like this shampoo would be a reasonable replacement for using Iron X to remove bonded iron particles from the paint, but I at least wanted to see how it performed for general cleaning.
The vehicle shown here had a layer of road salt and dirt buildup from driving on treated roads for a few days.
I added about 4 ounces of shampoo to my Foam Lance and filled the rest with water. This soap easily produced a nice, thick layer of foam on the vehicle. The car was then hand washed with the CarPro Merino Wool Wash Mitt. Iron X Snow Soap provided a good amount of lubrication, and the dirt and grime was easily removed from the vehicle with little effort.
After drying with our new favorite Griot’s Garage PFM towel, the vehicle looked perfect.
In the end, this product was a bit of a let down as I do not feel it is a practical solution for removing iron particles. The high product cost of using the soap at full strength does not make it a reasonable substitution to simply spraying with traditional Iron X which is considerably cheaper per use.
It worked very well for cleaning, but there are many other shampoos that are inexpensive and also clean very well, so the performance did not justify the added cost to me.
After going through a couple of bottles of Iron X Snow Foam, my personal preference is to stick with a more traditional shampoo such as Optimum Car Wash, Meguiar’s Hyper Wash, or Chemical Guys Citrus Wash which all sell for roughly the same price as Iron X Snow Foam, but you get 1 Gallon of soap instead of 1 Liter. If needed, we follow up with Iron X (available in either Cherry or Lemon Scent) to remove bonded iron particles after washing.
If you have experience using Iron X Snow Soap, please let us know how it worked for you in the comments below!