Can I dry my whole car with a blower?

I’m going to start off by giving you the answer you don’t want to hear: Potentially.

I’m writing this article to show the capabilities of a blower, how effective it is, pros/cons, etc. There are many blowers on the market – for cars, for leaves, and even pets. They range from cheap to expensive, large to small.
Some have Interchangeable filters, some are heated. First things first: blowers are fantastic for drying badges, mirrors, jambs, joins, grills, foglights, and all of those other angles that you just can’t get to with a towel. Nothing’s worse than drying a car only to get a run down the door from a mirror.
For this purpose – you could definitely use a smaller blower. There are many cheaper blowers in the market that will be able to achieve this – and it is well worth it. In my experience with this, a blower is terrible on a car that has no form of coating.
This includes anything from a ceramic coat to a beading coat – something that makes the car hydrophobic. I apply coatings every 3 months. The video attached is after a pre-rinse, 2 bucket wash and coating , so the car is super slick at this stage.

You can see that it moves a large body of the water quite quickly – but still leaves some behind and to get rid of that is more time consuming. It will take longer than a towel dry. I am sure as an alternative a drying aid here would have much the same effect.

HOWEVER If you are then applying something like a spray coating, this is fine. This can be applied when the car is slightly moist. Therefore, you can blowdry the whole car. If you are a 2+ crew, you can have one person on the blower and one person on a towel to follow up. This also works. The advantage of the above two scenarios is that you’re using less drying towels that you have to take care of later – and you’re still getting into all the gaps and seams where water would normally run. So these scenarios are both positives. On a side note, if you’re doing a quick detail spray after your wash, you could blow a bit more than normal and this would also suffice. Pros:

• Moves the majority of water, as long as it is hydrophobic.
• Gets into more crevices and jambs that a towel couldn’t do.
• Less washing of your drying towels. Also makes it easier to use thinner towels. I am a fan of waffle weave towels as they’re easier to wash and dry.

Cons:

• The big ones aren’t cheap – and some of them are 15 amp which you may not have access to if you’re mobile and at a customer’s site.
• Water marks if you’re too slow. A quick detailer will clean them up if you do this.
• You will still need to towel dry or move onto another method.