Winterizing our engines

We winterized on Tuesday, November 4 during a very nice afternoon. Obviously, we only do this once a year and despite the fact that we've been doing it to our various boats' engines for perhaps 35 years, it is always a little sloppier than we remembered. Lots of hot oil, full oil filters and many jugs of oil and antifreeze to be poured or pumped. We wear plastic gloves but never attempt this task wearing any clothes that would be acceptable outside of a boat yard. The old hoodie that Bill wore on Tuesday has the stains of many colors of bottom paint going back 12-15 years.

Changing the oil

The sloppiest part of this job is always changing the oil filters and that's where we begin. First, we start the engines and warm them to thin out the engine oil and make it easier to pump out of the crankcases. Then we remove the oil engine oil filters. Some time ago, we moved the filters from the engines themselves (where they were almost impossible to reach) to remote mounts in front of the engines. (Our engines are on v-drives, so the engines face aft.)

There's no way to do this easily. We use a strap wrench to loosen the filter slightly, slip a zip-lock bag over it and then unscrew it the rest of the way by hand. The hot oil makes the filter very slippery but it eventually drops into the zip-lock bag. The zip-lock bag never catches all the old oil so we use "Puppy Pads" stuffed down in the bilge under the filter to absorb what does drip. They are a lot cheaper than the absorbent sheets you can buy at a marine store and work great.

Putting the new filter on is pretty straightforward but it has to be filled with fresh engine oil first. A filter like this Fram PH8A takes about a quart. The whole oil change is supposed to total five quarts on our engines but another one-half quart is needed to also fill the remote oil filter lines, which are about three feet long each. Note the old filter in its baggie. Zip-lock bags are great for containing that crappy old oil.

Next we suck out the old oil from the crankcases.

We use a Marpac Fluid Xtractor. I think we've owned at least three or four oil pumps, both electric and vacuum, over the years but this one, now five years old, is the only one that really works. Give the handle a dozen or so pumps and it starts pulling the old oil up through the dipstick tube almost immediately. It holds 4.2 quarts and it does need to be pumped again a couple of times to get the last of the old oil out.

Once both engines have been filled with fresh oil, we start them up, watch the oil pressure build and check for leaks.

Winterizing the cooling system

Over the years, we've assembled some tools for this task. One is an old six gallon bucket that once held some industrial flavoring.  We cut a hole in the bottom and added a valve and then a long section of hose. This thing has winterized our boats for many years. Yes, it leaks a little, but for the few minutes it's in use, who cares? It all goes into the bilge.

Then we go to the thru-hull fitting that feeds seawater to the boat's heat exchangers.  Here, we've added a simple t-fitting that will allow the engine to draw antifreeze from our bucket, after we have closed the sea cock.

Fill the bucket with three gallons of antifreeze, open the valve and start the engine and about 45 seconds later, pink antifreeze is flowing out the exhaust and the bucket is empty.

It's probably worth mentioning that our engines are "fresh water" cooled, meaning that the cooling of the engine block itself and part of the exhaust manifolds is done through a heat exchanger that is actually filled with a 50-50% mixture of ethylene glycol (green) antifreeze and water. The pink antifreeze that we're using here only protects the seawater circuits in the heat exchanger and exhaust manifolds. That's why we can do it with just three gallons of pink antifreeze.

We've seen lots of discussion of this pink stuff on Internet forums. We shop for the best price and this year paid $3 a gallon at Tractor Supply. We've used this antifreeze through a number of very cold winters here (-20 degrees F at times) and have never had a freezing issue.

We ran out of time before we could winterize the boat's hot and cold water systems but we'll do that next weekend.

We've added a video showing some of this process. At this point, it clearly shows that Bill needed a haircut. Other than that, it was fun to do and to play narrator.