Beware of Engine Flush Products and Services!

[Th3Revreant]

I was going to purchase some engine flush products and take my newly aquired laser to have this done. Came across this and thought I would share this with the community. Turns out just using a high quality, full synthetic motor oil with detergents is the best route.

EZLUBE and JIFFY LUBE exposed Part 1 of 2 - YouTube

 

[pdbracke]

those quick lube places should be illegal. Stick to your own maintenance

 

[daniel dee]

those quick lube places should be illegal. Stick to your own maintenance

Second that!
Don't forget to clean your combustion chamber (seafoam)?

 

[Evilimports]

If you stick with a quality oil and and change it regularly you do not need to "flush" your engine. Biggest problem with it is if you have a lot of sludge buildup from cheap oil it can clog oil galleries once it starts letting loose.

 

[gusu]

those quick lube places should be illegal. Stick to your own maintenance

As stupid as it may sound I think there should be a certification requirement to work at simple lube shops.

People take their cars there thinking these people know cars and not thinking "This D-bag got hired off the street and couldn't even find the drain plug.". This simply isn't the case a majority of the time.

Places like Wal-Mart at least require you to use a computer learning module to teach you your job and every few months makes you take it again. This of course does help, but of course people do cheat as well.

At least if you had to be certified you'd have something you might not want to lose because it makes it at least a bit easier to get a job.

I'm not saying make the course hard, but at least make it go over everything you should know. It should also be quick, no prereq bullshit, and offered pretty much everywhere that does any kind of automotive class... maybe make it so you can take it as a class in high school? Of course this course should be quick and cheap as well.

 

[96 420a-t]

I work at a place that does this. I have not heard of an issue with this but I wouldn't personally recommend these services. Primarily for the buisines this is a way to make lots of money on products tha are really cheap. The place i work at recommends those same to services on EVERY vehicle that comes in. Honestly it is all a scam that makes money.

 

[foxracing4500]

people are dumb,

sales person: uhhhh you need headlight washer fluid
Derp: umm ok at least I will see better.

 

[PieEyedPiper]

I wish I could punch the editor of that video right in his biased face. What a shameful exhibit of "reporting".

Anyways, yeah, don't waste your time or money on that shit.

 

[99gst_racer]

I believe the injector cleaning service is nothing more than a fuel additive that's added to the fuel tank. If that's the case, then I don't see how that would ever be harmful. I've used products like that in the past and never had an issue. Obviously the executive that mentioned that the fuel cleans the injectors has never seen a set of injectors with 200,000 miles on them.

And what's bad about an A/T tranny flush? Isn't it using new fluid to pump old fluid out? I don't see how that's harmful.

 

[Chrispy0530]

And what's bad about an A/T tranny flush? Isn't it using new fluid to pump old fluid out? I don't see how that's harmful.

I think they mention in "part 2" of the video that they were charging for A/T Tranny flushes, and were actually not performing them.



I personally never let anyone do a thing to my cars unless it's alignments or machine work. If you must have someone do something to your car, make sure it's someone you can trust. People these days cut corners everywhere to save a buck or two.

 

[AndrewD5418]

If you actually read those engine flush things, like the one in the silver can it says "Not for use on engines equipped with a turbocharger".

 

[TallestHERETIC]

I don't believe this! People can't be this dumb, right? If a car's company even says dont use engine flush or certain engine chemicals, why the hell would people still do it? You can easily find all this info in the instruction manual! How these places still exist is beyond me. Taking care of a car is NOT hard at all. Stick to the scheduled maintainence and you will have no problems.

These kinds of places hire welfare moms, high school dropouts and even convicts off the street. What makes people think they are in good hands with losers like that working on their cars? Numbers matter, people dont. That is the motto of most companies in this day.

Whatever ever happened to saying "No" to all that crap and reading labels, like a responsible consumer should? Stupid people deserve what they get....

 

[jcart953]

Whatever ever happened to saying "No" to all that crap and reading labels, like a responsible consumer should? Stupid people deserve what they get....

I disagree those technicians were clearly misrepresenting facts, and as such there companies been fined $5million in the past. While I would agree that its important to be "a responsible consumer", its not always possible to know about everything.
This is why you generally rely on the company or person to be ethical, which clearly those companies were not.

 

[Th3Revreant]

This post was geared more toward the engine flush thing. I tend to do my own maintainence on my vehicles. Had wal-mart in the past put the wrong oil filter on my car and ended up destroying my engine when all the oil leaked out while I was doing 70 on the highway. Needless to say, new car

 

[kclan]

I work next to an jiffy lube in midtown Kansas City Mo, i hear so many horror stories coming from that place. The most recent 2 are they did a radiator flush on a 2007 jeep liberty and oil change and they forget to re clip the radiator shroud and forgot to but new oil in the car. The other was an transmission flush on an Cadillac CTS, and it ran hot so the owner went back and made them top up the coolant and then gets back on the road. Now a couple blocks down the road his transmission drain plug comes off and bleeds out all over the street.

 

[xander061]

ive heard about people forgetting to put the oil plug in after an oil change. There's the blue collar comedy tour joke about the tire falling off the car after it was at a sears autocenter. I work at Sears and i saw one day that a trainee forgot to put the lug nuts on and the the tire fell off in the parking lot.

 

[WES_393]

One thing I think everyon should consider is that it is these people's job to sell you things. If they told you the engine flush was bad, they would never sell it. If they don't make sales, they don't have a job. This is the exact case with Auto Parts stores. If I told a customer that Lucas injector cleaner does virtually nothing, I would be fired. Regardless if it's true or not.

Ultimately, it is up to the customer to research any advice given about their car. If you know Joe Shmoe does trans flushing and you don't know what it is, research it. Yes, these shops have a bad history of messing things up. But you have to think, 90% of the people that shops and auto parts stores deal with can't even find the dipstick let alone know what is good or bad for a car. They just hop in the car and drive it till something goes wrong, then look for people to blame.

So in my eyes, it's caused by both shady companies and ignorant vehicle owners. If you have thousands invested in a vehicle, it's your obligation to know something about it. Not just trust what everyone tells you.

 

[DSM1G90]

Had wal-mart in the past put the wrong oil filter on my car and ended up destroying my engine when all the oil leaked out while I was doing 70 on the highway. Needless to say, new car

Did you go after them for this? Same here: won't go to Wally-world for any form of service....and I feel sorry for the suckers that do.


What can be bad (as reports go) is to use PENNZ oils, then switch to other oils. PENNZ is a paraffin wax based and the others are fossil based oils... and the two don't mix. If you do, then you'll get sludge and varnish buildups like horrible.

Nothing wrong with PENNZ, but stick with it and nothing else.

As for the "engine flush" - old timers used 1qt of ATF, 1 qt of kerosene, and a quart of oil.

Drain the pan of the dirty oil, put this mix in, start the motor and idle for 10 minutes then drain. I did that on an old straight six motor and amazing what that mix help break loose and made that motor run so much better...

True though: if you just follow the prevent maintenance for oil changes, no moto flushing is necessary.



Doing automatic trannies:

Pull one ATF line off the radiator and head it to a pan.
The nipple on the radiator is where you attach another hose that heads to the same pan.
Start the motor and put it in neutral to engage the tranny pump.
One hose will push out the old fluid to the pan.
When the fluid stops pouring out of one of the hoses, stop the motor an fill the tranny with new fluid. (ATF+4, or SP-II for our DSM's)
Start the motor again and the remainder of the bad fluid will push out until it starts to go nice and red then stop the motor.
Hook up the lines back to the radiator and continue to fill to the required level - HOT and in Neutral.
15 minute job.

-DSM

 

[Ozone302]

I used to work at jiffy lube and we had to do a ridiculous amount of online training before we could get in the shop. I mean literally like 12 hours of sitting on a computer and watching cheesy training videos and quizzes. Then after that you get hands on training for a couple days. Everyone I worked with was very knowlagable and were professional about the work they did. If I were ever too lazy to do an oil change, I would take it to jiffy lube. I worked at a ford dealership before that and was a lube tech so I did oil changes, tires, etc. and I can honestly say you would get a better quality oil change at a jiffy lube than a dealership. Dealership techs are dicks and are all out for themselves on their commission pay, so they're just gonna want it out ASAP because it doesn't pay anything do they won't do quality work. Jiffy lube I noticed is a team work thing. It's really cool. I've never experienced Walmart oil changes but just the name "Walmart" and "oil change" in the same sentence sounds bad.

 

[bryanwheat]

I used to work at jiffy lube and we had to do a ridiculous amount of online training before we could get in the shop. I mean literally like 12 hours of sitting on a computer and watching cheesy training videos and quizzes. Then after that you get hands on training for a couple days. Everyone I worked with was very knowlagable and were professional about the work they did. If I were ever too lazy to do an oil change, I would take it to jiffy lube. I worked at a ford dealership before that and was a lube tech so I did oil changes, tires, etc. and I can honestly say you would get a better quality oil change at a jiffy lube than a dealership. Dealership techs are dicks and are all out for themselves on their commission pay, so they're just gonna want it out ASAP because it doesn't pay anything do they won't do quality work. Jiffy lube I noticed is a team work thing. It's really cool. I've never experienced Walmart oil changes but just the name "Walmart" and "oil change" in the same sentence sounds bad.

I Agree jiffylube is pretty thorough. They have a good system where the lower bay stuff is all checked by the upper bay tech, and the upper bay tech is checked by the upper bay manager. Basically they make you verify that the oil drain plug is tight, the filter is warm, dry and tight. They also quiz you on how many grease fittings there are to make sure that you got them all. If i didn't work on my own car i would take it there for oil changes over walmart and day of the week.

 

[King_Milo]

A girl I know just wanted me to take a look at her car after the express lube used an impact wrench to tighten the drain plug. They ended up snapping the head off of the plug.
I told her to take it back to them and make them fix it but she said the shop was over an hour away so she went to another shop that quoted her 2 grand to fix the broken plug.

 

[Abe'sGST]

I don't know much about honda recommended services, but I do know for a fact what GM recommends. At my shop we do all kinds of GM recommended services which include both BG fuel injection service, and BG tranny flush. On top of that many other BG services.

Like mentioned above it is their job to sale these services, otherwise they would make very little money. The problem with those places is that they ASSUME every car manufacturer recommends those services when some manufacturers state they are harmful for their engines. Seems to me that both the owners and quick lube places need to do their homework.

I wish I could punch the editor of that video right in his biased face. What a shameful exhibit of "reporting

Lmao i know right! They don't look much like reporters to me.

A girl I know just wanted me to take a look at her car after the express lube used an impact wrench to tighten the drain plug. They ended up snapping the head off of the plug.
I told her to take it back to them and make them fix it but she said the shop was over an hour away so she went to another shop that quoted her 2 grand to fix the broken plug.

That's ridiculous man, who in the world would use an impact for a drain plug? Stuff like that makes me want to go punch somebody in the face.

 

[Th3Revreant]

Did you go after them for this?

Oh yeah, the ended up totaling the vehicle out, engine fried and seized like no tomorrow. They offered free oil change and tire services for a year if I didn't hold them responsible. I was 19 at the time and learned how to pretty much do everything shortly there after. They had to pay for a new 15k dollar (then) Chevy Aveo, my first car.

 

[Abe'sGST]

Oh yeah, the ended up totaling the vehicle out, engine fried and seized like no tomorrow. They offered free oil change and tire services for a year if I didn't hold them responsible. I was 19 at the time and learned how to pretty much do everything shortly there after. They had to pay for a new 15k dollar (then) Chevy Aveo, my first car.

That sucks man. I'm glad you didn't accept their offer of free oil changes for a year..I wouldn't be surprised if some people did.

 

[GSXturbomotegi]

I got a buddy that said, drain the old oil, put new in it, with a bottle of tranny fluid, run it till you watch your oil pressure drop some, shut it off, drain it, and refil.