Things to avoid when cleaning car ceilings

The importance of car ceilings

The standard car ceiling has 3 layers: base layer, foam layer, and outer lining layer. The outer layer is often made of felt, vinyl, or suede, creating a luxurious look for the car's interior. The outer layer and foam layer have the effect of insulating against heat and noise, and at the same time, help hide the wiring system and hardware of electrical components, antennas, and other unsightly accessories.

The quality of each fabric layer on each vehicle can vary:

For economy cars, the outer fabric layer of the ceiling often uses cheaper materials (felt, synthetic leather).

With more expensive cars, the ceiling often uses expensive textile (suede) materials.

In the insulation layer, the inner layer of foam glue helps the car's headliner to be softer. If the outer layer is damaged or torn, it can affect the quality of the inner glue layer. Without this thin layer of insulation, when parked/driven in the sun, it can be hot and when driving on the highway, the noise will be more obvious.

Furthermore, this insulation layer helps improve the sound experience and is tailored to each car's interior compartment. Therefore, it is necessary to keep the car ceiling clean, shiny, and minimize dust and mold as much as possible.

Reasons to clean car ceilings regularly

The car ceiling is the place that is often exposed to all the pollution, dust, humidity... from the outside through the air conditioning system or when opening the car door. For felt and suede materials, they are not as flat and smooth as normal fabrics, so the dust storage capacity of these materials is very good.

In addition, felt has the ability to absorb odors very well. Therefore, if you smoke or bring smelly food into the car, the car ceiling is very susceptible to bad odors.

Unlike leather, plastic, felt, suede car ceilings often collect more fine dust and dirt. This is a favorable environment for bacteria and mold to grow. This inadvertently causes respiratory diseases such as allergic rhinitis, sneezing, runny nose... If the humidity inside the car is too high or the cleaning process is not clean or the car is wet, it also causes this condition.

The fabric of the car's ceiling is ruffled: Improper cleaning of the car's ceiling will accidentally cause the fabric to be ruffled, making it unsightly. At the points where the fabric is ruffled or torn, dirt that sticks to this area will often be more difficult to clean.

Dirty, yellow, black stains on the car ceiling: Felt fabric is very easy to get sweaty, even if you touch the surface lightly (with hands covered with sweat, oil, paint, soft drinks, etc.) it can easily cause yellow/black stains that are difficult to remove.

Things to avoid when cleaning car ceilings

In case of cleaning the car ceiling from grease stains, the car owner can use a soft cloth dipped in a mixture of 3 water:1 vinegar to rub on this stubborn stain until clean.

Normally, to avoid cleaning the car's felt ceiling, the car owner should combine it with a general interior cleaning to maintain these parts most effectively.

Avoid wearing jewelry or clothes with hard zippers because they can easily tear the leather interior and scratch the car. Therefore, do not wear watches, rings, belts and other accessories and jewelry when washing and cleaning the car.

Absolutely do not use a wheel cleaning cloth to clean the car ceiling, because dirty and dusty wheels can easily dirty the car ceiling.

Avoid using non-specialized chemicals or car wash to clean the interior as they will affect the leather surface or the car's ceiling fabric.

Do not use the 2-in-1 vacuum cleaner and gun to clean directly, even sweep back and forth many times. This will make the car's ceiling ruffled immediately.

Do not use a brush with the solution to directly brush the car ceiling to clean the stains. This also makes the car ceiling rough, unsightly, not to mention the effectiveness is not high.