degrease your engine with the washing machine
 

If your wife won't let you do this, go to your mother's house and tell her you need to check her washing machine.

I unhooked the hot water line for the washing machine and ran the hose with a metal nozle outside to the car, sparayed the undercarriage and engine with Industrial Grade Greased Lightening and rinsed with hot water from the hose. It worked great. It cut the years of oil buildup like nothing I have ever seen.

Great idea.

If the water heater is in an ouside cubby/niche/ closet, which is typical here in California, there is a hose bib at the bottom of the heater that you can hook up your hose. This has the advantage of flushing some of the loose scale out of the water heater at the same time. ;)

How does one degrease their engine in an environmentally responsible manner? :bulb:

Find someone in the country and do it over their septic tank leaching lines...
I have done this over ours for years.. the grass dies for a couple of weeks.. and comes right back... Remember.. oil is organic..... it is only the Concentration that is a problem for the Enviornment to deal with sometimes...

u guys are freakin nuts.... I thought I was bad when it comes to tearing up things to work on the car

:eek:

I used Gunk the first few times to take care of the hard stuff. Now I just use Simple Green every few months and she stays clean.

allready tried it a while back. its cold at the bottom. there is a tube that sends the fresh cold water to the bottom. all that comes out is cold/a little warm water

This is a neat idea, so I hate to bust everybody's bubble, but it's really best to spend a couple bucks and do this at a self-serve car wash. After all, their water is usually hot anyway (at least warm) and they're required by local agencies to collect and treat all the drain water. All that gunk coming off our engines is probably like dumping a few quarts of old motor oil right on the ground. Not a good thing. If you do this in your driveway, it will flow through the gutters and storm drains and then into the nearest creek. :(

use the pressurized faucet for the washing machine
 

Use the pressurized faucet for the hot water line on the washing machine. It gives good pressure. I didn't wash off quarts of oil, just lots of grime. The grass always comes back. No storm drains where I live.

You sure don't want used motor oil in your kids drinking water. You really don't want to be eating veggies grown in those carcinogens either. But I guess this should maybe be saved for the general discussions area.

In California, the self-service car washes all have huge signs promising major criminal penalties for washing your engine, they call it "illegal disposal of hazardous materials"

Which leaves me driving around with a filthy engine, and getting oil-soaked every time I wrench on her.

What a drag. I have yet to find a place to legally get her cleaned, and I am open to suggestions....

Ironically here in Michigan the local self serve car washes even have an option on the control panel for "engine cleaner", it shows someone spraying their engine in the picture with a low pressure chemical that supposedly cleans the engine, I haven't done it, I don't know if I dare. But still, just the fact that they offer it.... :D

Interesting I have a car wash here in N. Kalifornia that has a setting on it Engine Degreaser! then I switch it to engine Bright and I am done. :) I love it!

I use the engine degreaser at the car wash and it works great! Never has given me any troubles when I go to start it afterwards. I have the cleanest smoke producing engine you can find. :musicbooh

Hmm....maybe I will give it a try then.....I've always wanted to clean my engine off......maybe I am too paranoid that it will mess up something.

California must be strict
 

I know California is more strict. I live in North Carolina and in the country, we don't have car washes. We test our well water since there are lots of farmers who use chemicals on their fields. I degreased mine in my parent's driveway and they have city water and city sewer. I degrease lawn mowers all the time. It would take a lot of runoff to contaminate a well - such as an auto shop who did this every day. I don't do it often. I dilute the runoff so much with water that it isn't going to make much difference. The amount of stuff that came off my car is inconsequential compared to the hog farms around here who have spilled runoff from hog waste lagoons into rivers and caused fish kills. State laws have changed this. We are not talking about much grease off my car when I do this. I regularly use lawn chemicals like roundup none have ever contaminated our well.