The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area General Truck Talk Degrease and be Environmentally Friendly?

Anyone have any tips on how to catch the grease and oil when I degrease the engine and engine/frame compartment? Products are available to cut the grease, but don’t want to anger my neighbors and environment with spent product pouring down the alley to the nearest drain gutter. Anyone attempted to use an old blanket? Hospital chucks?
Goal is to allow water to drain, but hold grease and solvent.
Thanks

Take it to the quarter car wash.

lonnie, you brought back memories from when i was younger.
i rememebr going to a car wash and popping my hood and using gunk on it, then using their water to hose the engine down.
the dude came running out and yelling. you would ahve thought i killed someone.
i didnt realize back then that all the water is recycled, so i was contaminating their water with my gunk. LOL.

oops....

leonard

Install a drain with a grease trap is the best way. Otherwise, look at using the oil spill abatement products. They are designed to trap oil but let water flow through.

If you took it to a quarter car wash here they would shut down the hose and have the environmental people here before you knew it. The same for spraying under the body in winter.
When you mention recycling the water think about all that old salty water that came off someone else's car in the winter and is now being sprayed on your car's body.
I once presure washed my rabbit cage and took it out of the trunk. The TV camera could not pick up what I was spraying behind my car and the operator was there in a heart beat.

i'll bet the environment protection agencies have mandated that all car multi quarter slot bandits have a sewer catch system so none of that stuff goes directly into any public water system and gets filtered away. if they were smart they'd have a filtering system for their own recycle H2O system.
Ps rrk i did the same thing. .... be

Now see if you lived in Mississippi you could cover a dead goat with grease and wash it at the local car wash with no problem. As a matter of fact someone would probably try to talk you out of the goat. I like the idea of putting down one of those synthetic fiber blankets the wal mart kind. Maybe put some on the ground and tape some plastic around the bottom of the truck to keep down the over spray. You could also dam up the drain with some screen and use sand on the uphill side as a filter. When I was a kid you could polish a dime with mercury, squeeze lead shot on your fishing line with your teeth and ride in the back window of a 57 Chevy while your parents smoked a carton of Viceroys.

Neil

A product like Awesome (Dollar Store) converts grease to a soap. I'm lucky, my truck had little grease... but not so lucky in the rust department.

I'm so glad I live in backwoods Tennessee! I can put a gallon of kerosene in my garden pump sprayer, hose down a greasy frame, and then blast it all with a gas-engined pressure washer down the drainage ditch to the nearest creek! Nobody cares, except the tree-hugger jerk down the road who gets upset when I shoot a deer, hang it up in the barn, and turn it into steaks, roasts, and burger! He used to get really upset until I explained the consequences of threatening somebody with a .30-06 in his hands!

Get that truck running, pack your goodies in it, and find someplace to live far away from those Nancy boys in Commiefornia!
Jerry

hot rod, i love your point of view man... awesome.
leonard

Gentelmen, great ideas. Understand, I have a small shop in Los Angeles. There is a quarter wash down the street, but I did not even think about cameras. Ouch! Ok, its a good thing I dont have more space than I do, cuz I would never stop buying old trucks.
Not one bad idea, but I think the Wal-Mart will be my first attempt. Can't afford to install a new drainage system, been spending too much $$$$ on my truck.
Thanks

Most of the car washes I've seen have an "Engine De-greaser" selection...
It's a bummer that you can't go that route.(after letting a can of de-greaser soak in)

You can always get one of these!

The best way, it to reduce the grease going on the ground by scraping and wiping it down first. Buy some grease absorbers that they use for spills to contain the area and immediately pour kitty litter on the ground after you wash, shovel up the kitty litter and properly dispose it.

Most car washes are required to have grease traps and secondary drains. They filter their water and separate the grease.

I’ve been observing the world around me for 66years and hope that I have learned a little something about it and the way that it works. For instance, I now know that the weather always comes from the west and that there is enough proof that the suns radiation can cause radiation burns and that there isn’t an unlimited supply of fresh water, even in the country where I lived all of my life. Oh yes, and that the country will become city with in a few decades no matter how far away from it you move.
When I was a kid growing up in, “the country,” the driveways and all of the side roads were gravel. Ya just scraped the bulk off, gunked it down and hosed it off into the gravel, it helped to keep down the dust you know. Pop, being an old school mechanic, taught us to clean anything that we were servicing until it was spotlessly cleaned in the gasoline bucket before it was reassembled. Of course when the gas bucket got dirty it also held down the dust in the drive along with the oil and anti-freeze changes.
Hand water pumps were a common sight all around town in the parks and on private property. A little joint pumping effort from you and a buddy yielded a clear sweet tasting drink to cool you off on a hot July afternoon, and it was free, can you believe it.
Anyway, the point is, that we have virtually destroyed the fresh water supply across much of the country in about a half-century, because of indiscriminant dumping. So if your lucky enough to live in an area where you still have a stream, pond, lake or other fresh water ya might want to think about taking better care of it, if not for your self, then for your grandchildren.
The answer?? I don’t know! So far in this discussion I haven’t seen any answers that seem adequate. Our county and most of the surrounding counties only have a collection once a year that is open for a couple of hours and will only take oil and a few other things. Not much of an incentive for the citizenry to conserve or recycle is it. I think our local government (us, our elected representatives) should be taking a serious look at providing convenient sites and procedures to dispose of used chemicals any day of the week any time of the year. How did that line go, “Build it and they will come!”
The generic term “Properly dispose” sounds great but it’s a political way of dumping the problem right back in your lap without and answer to the problem. That’s the same thing I here from the EPA or other authorities and it doesn’t answer the question of how! That is exactly what generated this thread in the first place two pages ago. How do you properly dispose of the waste when there isn’t a dump station any where around your town or county?
Gotta go get my “big old wife off to work,” goo’day!
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL

Way to go Denny!

Denny - Good point! But I hope you didn't kill this thread.. since any solution will invariably impact something and therefore be deemed environmentally unfriendly by someone.

don't start
I'm so glad I live in backwoods Tennessee! I can put a gallon of kerosene in my garden pump sprayer, hose down a greasy frame, and then blast it all with a gas-engined pressure washer down the drainage ditch to the nearest creek! Nobody cares, except the tree-hugger jerk down the road who gets upset
.... and find someplace to live far away from those Nancy boys in Commiefornia!
Denny's got some great points here and i for another second his thoughts.
that's why our forests are on fire ... our
it's ok look what those tree-hugger jerk down the road whackos did in Commiefornia!
lowered EPA air quality mandates, provide cleaner air and better cleaner water for fishing, not to mention drinking the stuff. so have you bought shares in bottled tap water from some place called artisa tenn http://www.waymarking.com/groups/de...lat=35.139233&lon=-90.034867&t=6 in memphis tenn.
but here in the foothills where there is some of the best steelhead & golden trout fishing available you may not want to eat the fish cause our for fathers left us arsonic when mining gold as well as mercury and potentially contaminated sediments methylation reactions and bioaccumulation; the actual cycling is much more complex. Hg(0), elemental mercury; Hg(II), ionic mercury (mercuric ion); methylmercury dissolved organic carbon.........................
they then moved away from the left coast to parts unknown

do the best you can 46