Cleaning Common Automotive Spills

When you first start doing your own automotive maintenance and repair work, you'll find yourself making some pretty impressive messes. Even as an auto repair veteran, I still find myself making a few good ones. Since spills are a pretty common occurrence with mechanical work, knowing how to clean them up should be part of your knowledge base.

Most automotive spills and messes are petroleum related, and that's because most of the chemicals used in your car (gasoline, motor oil, and various other lubricants) are petroleum based. The other common spill is ethylene gycol, otherwise known as antifreeze.

Gasoline Spills
My most recent spill was about a gallon of gasoline from the motorcycle I have been working on. In addition to smelling foul, a gasoline spill will stain concrete, soak into anything the the garage it can reach, and is flammable until it is dry. Luckily, gasoline is also fairly easy to clean up.

1. Soak up any pooled gasoline. There are commercially available products for this, and they work quite well. However, we have three cats so we have kitty litter on hand, and it works as well as the purpose-made products and they're frequently made of the exact same material. 
2. Cover the standing gas with the litter and work it around with a stiff broom until it is all absorbed. 
3. Sweep the contaminated material into a plastic or metal container and place it outside to dry. This keeps gas fumes from building up in your house or garage. 
4. Call your local landfill or trash disposal company for instructions on how to dispose of this material safely, as laws and capabilities vary by jurisdiction.
5. Scrub the spill area with a strong mixture of liquid dish soap and hot water and the same stiff broom that you used before. This will clean up the gas that has soaked into the concrete
6. Rinse the area and repeat as needed until the smell and stain go away. The strong soap mixture breaks down and dilutes the gasoline, making it safe to hose down.

Motor oil and other petroleum-based chemicals are cleaned with the exact same process as gasoline. If they feel oily on your fingers, that's a great indicator that this process will work.

Old or especially stubborn stains can be cleaned, but they require harsh, dangerous chemicals such as Trisodium Phosphate and yield less return for the effort and risk. In almost all situations, once the smell is gone and the dish soap isn't removing any more stain, you're safe to stop the process.

Antifreeze Spills
Antifreeze cleans up a bit differently.

1. Soak up any standing puddles, just like with gasoline. The big difference is what happens afterward.
2. Hose the entire area down with water. Antifreeze is water soluble, and this helps dilute it somewhat. 
3. Cover the stained area with powdered laundry detergent. Cover this powder with soaked newspapers and let it sit and soak for a few hours. Wet rags also work, but they're not as easy to clean up.
4. Remove and discard the newspapers after the soap has had a couple hours to soak in, then use your stiff broom to scrub the laundry detergent until suds form. 
5. Rinse the concrete with water and allow to dry. 
6. Repeat as needed if stains remain.

Spills happen. Cleaning them up properly makes for a safer, healthier, and better work space.

Lokidude

Gun Blog Variety Podcast #120 - Your Life is a Kitchen

So bake as many pies as you want with the GunBlog VarietyCast!

• Beth brings her husband Sean (not GBVC Sean, a different Sean) back on to talk about being a couple who shoot competitively.
• A 32-year-old woman is accused of stabbing her 61-year-old former roommate to death. Sean takes a closer look.
• Barron is on assignment and will return soon.
• In the Main Topic, Sean and Erin answer a pair of questions from a liberal gun-owning listener: "What do you hear when a liberal says 'We need to have a conversation', and what do you hear when a liberal says 'We need to compromise' ?"
• In a late night/early morning segment, Tiffany discusses the First Amendment concept of "fighting words" and how that relates to your Second Amendment right to armed self-defense. 
• When the oil from the hurricane lamps you've got stored in the garage leaks all over the floor, how can you get it cleaned up? Erin gives you some tips.
• Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is back, this time in a Vice News interview. You know what that means: it's time for another patented Weer'd Audio Fisk™!
• Our plug of the week is for Roll20.

Thank you for downloading, listening, and subscribing. You are subscribed, right? We are available on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, and now on Google Play Music!

Listen to the podcast here.

Read the show notes here. 

Thanks also to Firearms Policy Coalition for their support. 

Blue Collar Prepping Transcript:

Lamp Oil Cleanup on Aisle Five!

Now that my family has unpacked the Christmas decorations and strung them up across the house, it’s time for the annual cleaning up of the garage in the hopes that maybe this is the year we’ll get it all organized. I say “hopes” because invariably something goes wrong, and this year is no exception.

We maintain several hurricane lamps in the house for, not surprisingly, if we lose electricity from a hurricane. And we’ve had these lamps for a long time -- at least 30 years now.

Now despite these lamps being old they haven’t received a lot of use, because storms rarely knock out electricity for more than a few hours and because (with my help) my family has moved on to battery-powered means of long term light.

But batteries can wear down, and it’s always good to have backups, so we’ve kept these lamps around. However, the drawback to owning one is that you also need to stay well-stocked with lamp oil.

Now I don’t know if our listeners know this -- I certainly didn’t until this past week -- but apparently the plastic bottles that store lamp oil can become brittle after, oh, a decade of storage in a garage, and past that point bumping them, or even moving them, will cause them to crack (or in our case, shatter) and leak all over the place.

So this past week has involved me asking the collective wisdom of the Blue Collar Prepping Facebook Group -- if you aren’t a member, you’re wrong, join today -- how to clean up the stinky stain in my garage and if there’s any hazard associated with it.

So first of all, lamp oil is just highly refined kerosene, with a flash point -- that means “the temperature at which it ignites” -- of 363 degrees F. This is not to be confused with the auto ignition point, which means “the temperature at which it spontaneously ignites without needing a spark”, and is a much higher 428 degrees F.

These are all good things to know, because it means that the spill won’t catch fire in a hot garage!

So, onto the cleanup, and the techniques I outline here can be used for other forms of fuel, like gasoline.

The first thing I need to do it absorb as much of the oil as possible. This is best done with clay-type non-clumping cat litter, although dry sand will also work. Cover the stain with it, wait until it’s saturated, then dispose of the litter or sand and replace it. I need to keep doing this until there’s no more oil to be absorbed, and if I really want to get aggressive I can scrub the litter into the floor with my shoe or a broom.

After that, I’m going to spray the stain with carburetor cleaner. This is supposed to “lift” any remaining oil out of the concrete and allow it to be absorbed as disposed of.

I need to spray the stain until it’s covered -- not a thick coat, just wetted down -- let it stand about 5-10 minutes, then put more kitty litter onto it. I’m told that I should repeat this about 3 more times. This will probably get out everything it’s possible to get out.

After THAT, I need to use Dawn dishwashing soap to break down whatever oil is left and cause it float to the top. More kitty litter!

After that’s done, it’s just a simple matter of washing off the rest of the Dawn with water and a mop.

Of course, all of this trouble could have been avoided if I’d prevented the lamp oil from spilling in the first place. What I’m going to do to keep this from happening in the future is to keep our remaining bottles of oil in a big plastic storage tub. That way, even if the bottles break, the only mess will be inside the tub instead of all over the floor!