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.

Hey all

Instead of using cleaners like Gunk, use BIODIESEL. It is an excellaent biosolvant. My wife uses it for hard to clean stuff says it great, claims it makes her hands softer too. Biodiesel degrades w/ in 28 days. That is one of the characteristics that make Biodiesel such an environmentally friendly product. :sun_smile

Now as far as the stuf you clean off your engine ...... No comment

Gary T

You do it in somebody elses yard :D

If your well taps an aquifer, testing the well water does not tell you what's happening to the ground water. The ground water flows (eventually) into the nearest body of surface water. This has turned into a real problem for marine life (that's fisheries, sports fishing, and the shellfish industry for people who only think in those terms) in these bodies of water.

Tedious, perhaps, but I use paper towels doused with white gas to clean the engine. I know, burning the paper towels is also a problem (for god's sake, wait until the gas has evaporated) but not as bad as another hit on the shellfish and fisheries.

I will definitely be more enviro friendly
 

I feel like I am the one responsible for this discussion.
I will commit to be more enviro friendly the next time I do this. Sorry for my enviromental mistake this once.

I am all for being responsible with your environmental pollutants and would like to brain a few people that I have seen dumping oil and such. But if you ever go to a tank wash where they clean the tanks for the tanker trucks or to a refinery or paper mill you will realize that cleaning your engine is a tiny drop in the bucket of swill that this country produces. Before you dump anything in your own yard keep in mind that you may need to grow your own vegetables there someday.

Someone in another thread mentioned that it may be possible to go to a rental place and use their steam cleaner on premises. Couldn't hurt to ask.

I heard a good idea for environmentally safe engine degreasing the other day that sounded really good.

What you do is put a very large drip tray, or even a sheet of plastic with the edges raised up by 2X4s, under the engine. Then you go about your cleaning, block off the intake, spray on a biodegradable degreaser (I like non-phosphorus water-based degreasers), then scrub scrub scrub. When you've scrubbed, rinse with a low-pressure source, and then repeat if necessary (if you've never cleaned the engine, expect do one or two passes on the dirtiest parts). Each time you rinse, water and grease and crap goes into the tray. When you are done, leave the tray alone for a few days until the water evaporates. What you are left with is dirt, grease, and oil, which can be scraped up easily and can be legally added to your used crankcase oil and taken to recyclers.

The idea is the same as what we use to dispose of greywater at Burning Man, large trays or pools made from tarps that greywater goes into. It evaporates cleanly, leaving a film of soap on the tarp, the tarp can then be folded in half, rolled up, and carted away, to be used again next year without contaminating the soil.

So anyway, just thought I'd share. It sounds like a pretty easy way to do engine cleaning at home without contaminating your residence or water table.

peace,
sam