Washing a bike is for those people who have covers on their new furniture and tell you to take your shoes off when you are a guest in their home. It is a habit worth breaking, in my opinion. Use the power of rain and if things get really grubby then use your jeans, as you sit on the bike, or the rear of one of your gloves to wipe the excess muck off. The only time you should be cleaning parts of a bike is when you are preparing for painting or about to sell it. A highly polished bike normally goes with low mileage, not always but very frequently. The Japanese didn't spend multi millions of yen developing a quick wipe clean product, they spent it on technology (oh, and on parts destined to fail to keep you in the dealer network). If one of my bikes falls over it just takes some of the dirt off. You need to embrace dirt as natures way of giving your bike an extra layer of protection. It's free and takes no time to accumulate and, to some, proves that the powers that be was a bike lover as he/she gave us such a wonderful gift of free bike protection.