Oil spills

[Austin]

Gents, this evening I was wrenching in the garage. I was under my Jeep and accidentally knocked over a quart of oil with my feet. Needless to say I made a mess in the garage. I have used kitty litter for spills since I was a kid. It works but is not great.

What do you gents use for oil spills?

 

[thirdeye]

I use pig mats....I used to use kitty liter or speedy dry but they leave a little to be desired.

 

[luvmysuper]

I go three step -

Rags for the worst of the wet, followed by kitty litter for the stuff you can't get with rags. After the kitty litter has a few minutes to soak up, sweep it up and put it with the rags, then sprinkle laundry detergent on what is left. It is very fine and absorbent and will soak up the remainder.
Sweep it up and put it all in a bag. Then all you need is a damp scrub brush, and the residual laundry detergent will break the oil and allow you to get it out of the pores of the concrete.

 

[airplanedoc]

Pig mat then simple green.

Of course under my last jeep, I had a 2' X 4' aluminium catch pan

 

[Walter Sobchak]

Ditto on the Pig Mats, followed by Simple Green degreaser.

I've used some stuff that looked like shredded sawdust/cigarette tobacco before and it worked great, but I don't know where to get it.

 

[toucanlamp]

At the place I work when we're out in the yard and the forklifts leak something, they just have this special stuff, I think it pretty much is kitty litter, maybe a special material, but you just dump the little grains of it all over the area, it sucks it all up, then you I guess in theory are supposed to scoop it all up and take it to some sort of special environmental cleanup centre, but for small little puddles of oil I think putting it in the garbage would be ok.

 

[auk1124]

Another vote for powdered laundry detergent, works pretty good.

 

[thebikingengineer]

Oil dry (kitty litter without the scent basically) and then an uncut degreaser if there's a stain. If the litter doesn't work try searching out some vermiculite, but know that it won't be cheap. Last resort would be activated charcoal, but that's $$$.

 

[Wilpar76]

I go three step -

Rags for the worst of the wet, followed by kitty litter for the stuff you can't get with rags. After the kitty litter has a few minutes to soak up, sweep it up and put it with the rags...

This.

I would also add that Simple Green is an excellent de-greaser.

 

[RBE17]

For a spill like that I'd wipe it up w/ old rags. After that I'd put kitty litter down and walk over and grind it into the spill. I've found this works pretty well.

Funny kitty litter story:

When we moved into our last house I was doing some work on my '95TA. I had a drain pan under the engine filled w/ kitty litter to catch any errant coolant while I wasn't working on it. Anyway, being a new place I'd let the cat into the garage to catch mice. After a few days of this the garage started getting a weird smell. When I finally got back to the car a week or so later the drain pan was full of cat turds. She wasn't going in there to catch mice at all. I just chuckled and threw the turds away.

 

[BrianL]

Powdered laundry soap worked the last time I had a spill.