Dry ice vs everything else.

Every cleaning method is the right answer to some job and the wrong answer to others. These comparisons exist because we would rather tell you when dry ice is the wrong tool than sell it to you anyway — if you are stripping a bare aluminium panel or washing a driveway, you should not be booking dry ice.

The short version

Dry ice blasting is non-abrasive and leaves no residue. Pellets of solid CO₂ hit the surface, break the bond between the contamination and the substrate through thermal shock, and sublimate straight to gas. Nothing is added, so nothing has to be rinsed, dried, swept up or disposed of afterwards.

That makes the decision fairly simple in most cases. If you want material removed — paint back to bare metal, rust cut out, a surface profile for recoating — an abrasive method like sandblasting is faster and cheaper, and abrasion is the point. If you want a layer lifted off a surface you intend to keep, or you are working somewhere water, chemicals or spent media would create a second problem, dry ice is what the comparison keeps landing on: engine bays, live electrical gear, food production lines, heritage fabric, and anything that must go back into service the same day.

The five comparisons below each go through the full trade-off — cost, surface risk, residue, downtime — and each one names the jobs where the other method genuinely wins.