Product to Clean and Digest Diesel in Bilge?

[coopec43]

I am interested in this thread as I have a problem on my yacht where a hydraulic hose burst

Doing a bit of research just now I came across this. Any comments?

Cat Litter is one of the best-known solutions to absorb oil. Use clean litter and sprinkle it over the spill. Give the litter time to absorb the oil. After it has been absorbed, you can sweep the litter away.
https://www.hunker.com/12485273/what...ill-absorb-oil

[Hunky Dory]

After oily water is cleared, By vacuum or pads,I spray the bilge with Super Clean which can be purchased economically from Walmart. Then use a sponge and water to finish cleaning and deoiling.

[a64pilot]

Cat litter is sold also by the name OIL Dry, it and I’m sure sawdust works great on concrete etc, but it also will absorb water and turn into mud or wet saw dust.
The shop vac works well, the way to do it though is to just barely touch the water with the vacuum tube and suck only the surface up as of course that is where the fuel and or oil is. Unless you have an enormous amount of oil or fuel the bilge pump won’t pump it overboard because of course the pump pumps from the bottom and the oil floats on top.

Home Depot sells a great wet vac, it’s called the bucket head, costs $25. What is so great about to is it uses the $3 each 5 gl Home Depot buckets as a vacuum canister, so buy a few buckets and go to town. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Bucket-H...vacuum%7D%3Aqu
Then when you have the four or five buckets full of oil / water mix then that’s the time to use your absorbent pads on the liquid in the buckets, once the pads absorb all the oil then you have to decide what to do with the water, I don’t have a good answer. Water in used oil makes it hard to recycle or unable to recycle, I know the recycler who picked up my oil on the farm wouldn’t take it with any water in it.

Any kind of bilge cleaner is really just detergent and that emulsifies the oil which means it mixes the oil and water together. I don’t know about the digesters, but taking a long time to break down is logical, it takes a long time for nature to deal with it too, and I assume any “digestor” is a naturally occurring bacteria lab grown and sold, like the ones for septic tanks.

Once you get the bilge as dry as possible than you can go at it with 409 and paper towels etc. But then what do you do with the paper towels that of course have oil on them and what do you do with the oil absorbent pads?
How is throwing them away and different from just dumping oil in the dumpster?

I don’t have a good answer, to be truthful I throw them away and dump the water after I get all the oil off, cause what else can I do?

But I do get the majority of the oil out, I don’t just toss in detergent to emulsify it, and put a garden hose in the bilge and let it run for an hour.

[Dulcesuenos]

Google "Digest it" works great, enzymatic cleaner

[Cheechako]

Just use some absorbent pads, to soak up the oil and diesel. They work great.

[coopec43]

I loathe pollution of our environment of any type.

But what do we do with the oil absorbed pads? Apparently nature has a way of handling oil spills so my conscience is a bit clearer when I dump them in the rubbish bin.

"Global estimates suggest that naturally occurring oil seeps account for some 47% of the oil released into the ocean environment; on average, 160,000 tons of petroleum leak into waters surrounding North America each year. ... Satellite synthetic aperture radar shows persistent oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico".

https://www.saildrone.com/news/usv-s...ep-gulf-mexico

[Wotname]

Originally Posted by coopec43

I am interested in this thread as I have a problem on my yacht where a hydraulic hose burst

Doing a bit of research just now I came across this. Any comments?

Cat Litter is one of the best-known solutions to absorb oil. Use clean litter and sprinkle it over the spill. Give the litter time to absorb the oil. After it has been absorbed, you can sweep the litter away.
https://www.hunker.com/12485273/what...ill-absorb-oil

I'm told that wood fuel pellets make an excellent (and cheap) cat litter so perhaps the same pellets would be good for absorbing oil. I have never used wood pellets for burning or cats or oil so this is a suggestion only

https://www.bunnings.co.nz/firetime-...-fuel_p0637074

[Sea Q]

Burst hydrolic lines and diesel fuel lines and then just drips of the engines.
yup i know too well .
use the pads to soak up
i line the engine pans and certain points in the bilge so any runs over them .
you have to depose of them like oil waste.
use a cheap shop vac to suck it up pour into bucket with a pad in it it and let it sit for an hour and then drain the water out

Never try to water it down with chemicals it just reforms on the outside.
i warned the idiots in the gulf spill to cap and collect the oil as best they could but never never use disperants on the oil because it would sink and come up slowly over years and kill 10 times more birds

[Cheechako]

Cat litter is great. (The old fashioned kind, it's just dried clay) It's used commercially all over manufacturing plants to soak up oil.
However, I wouldn't use it in a bilge, not easy to get it all back out! Use oil absorbent pads to get the oil out, oil floats and the pads do too and absorb it. Then clean the bilge water with Joy or Dawn.

[er9]

Originally Posted by a64pilot

Once you get the bilge as dry as possible than you can go at it with 409 and paper towels etc. But then what do you do with the paper towels that of course have oil on them and what do you do with the oil absorbent pads?
How is throwing them away and different from just dumping oil in the dumpster?

I don’t have a good answer, to be truthful I throw them away and dump the water after I get all the oil off, cause what else can I do?

But I do get the majority of the oil out, I don’t just toss in detergent to emulsify it, and put a garden hose in the bilge and let it run for an hour.

we have an used oil drop off site in our marina near the launch ramp. they let you drop off used oil, oil filters as well as used oily rags etc...they've also taken anti freeze from me a couple of times and didnt seem to care.

[Viking Sailor]

Be careful when using an electric vac to suck up petroleum products from the bilge. A guy in a nearby slip was doing just that and had a minor explosion. He wasn't hurt but it did blow a hole in the vac and get cabin sole wet and dirty.

[RaymondR]

Originally Posted by Mike Banks

The best thing I know that will absorb oil as well as water is sieved raw dry untreated sawdust. Most sawmills are happy for you to take away as much as you can. If the sawdust you get is wet from the water used to cool the saws, you can sun-dry it for a day or so out of the wind, but usually it will not be necessary,
Sawdust is very absorbent, and it has a strong affinity for oil.

Having put heaps of it into the bilges and absorbed anything in there, you now need a big vacuum cleaner of the wet/dry type to extract it all.

When you have done so, if you wish to have unscented bilges, you can now scrub the place out using dish washing detergent and absorb the soap and rinse water using those car wash sponges and a bucket..

Lotsa luck.

Yep, way to go Mike.

Back in my youth I worked in a garage which had concrete floors which had not been properly cleaned in years. I had a bucket of soapy water trying to scrub them clean which was pretty futile. The boss took a bucket of diesel and threw it on the floor and sent me to the sawmill to get a trailer load of sawdust. The diesel turned the greasy dirt into oily dirt which the sawdust then soaked up and I was able to sweep it into heaps and shovel it up. In all the decades since I cannot recall having seen anything as effective as that sawdust for soaking up grease and oil.

The oily sawdust does burn well if you dry it in the sun first, if you are in a remote place and have no other means of disposal.

[Simi 60]

Originally Posted by Cheechako

Cat litter is great. (The old fashioned kind, it's just dried clay) It's used commercially all over manufacturing plants to soak up oil.
However, I wouldn't use it in a bilge, not easy to get it all back out! Use oil absorbent pads to get the oil out, oil floats and the pads do too and absorb it. Then clean the bilge water with Joy or Dawn.

Nope, cat litter (or at least the one our cat uses) is useless for soaking up oil.
https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/p...at-litter-clay

Our gearbox was dropping 1 litre every 8 hours of use of 40 weight oil.
37 litre capacity so no real drama
Cat litter did nothing but make a mess.

[thinwater]

Originally Posted by Simi 60

Nope, cat litter (or at least the one our cat uses) is useless for soaking up oil.
https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/p...at-litter-clay

Our gearbox was dropping 1 litre every 8 hours of use of 40 weight oil.
37 litre capacity so no real drama
Cat litter did nothing but make a mess.

Having spent many years in the oil industry, cat litter (clay) only works if the surfaces are DRY. I never tried it in a boat, but I'm sure it would create a bilge-plugging mess.

It is effective at sucking oil out of DRY concrete, which is what shops use it for. Grinding it in under foot helps.