Apartment dwellers... where are you doing your oil changes?
- Thread starter e36andy
- Start date
When I was young, my apartments were two family houses, so I did maintenance in the driveway or in the street. Nobody ever bothered me. In garden style apartment so or condo's, that can get tricky. I've always wondered why DIY rental garages have never really taken off. Seems to me that could be a nice business, but maybe the pool of clientele is too small.
A guy in college who rented used the bathtub to degrease an engine from a Triumph. His roommate was not happy.
I've gotta wonder about our litigious society. Giving a noob a 2-post lift seems questionable, and no amount of liability waivers will protect you 100%
I sat on a jury where a house had a minor explosion due to sewer gases, and most of the jury wanted to award millions, even though only one person had minor injuries.
The only problem with that is that it would be difficult to get the proper lighting under there to see what you’re doing. Unless you got one of those bright lights that miners wear on their heads
I wear one of those even in daylight, as often places i need to see have a dark shadow. To me they are an essential part of wrenching. Tonight i was out in the dark fixing a truck on the side of the road, wore my head lamp, could see perfectly. Get a good one, rechargeable.
Quick bump to this thread and a response to shortyb... I like the idea of an extractor I had totally forgotten that was an option. The only issue is my wife's CX5 has the filter underneath the car.Find/make a friend with a garage. Seriously though, I have about a half dozen friends that come over to do oil changes in mine. They supply the oil and filters of their choice and I do the rest. Great time to hangout and socilize (which usually means drink beer). Most times they pop for pizza for "renting" the garage.
Extractors are golden for keeping a low profile while doing drains in a parking lot and pulling up to the curb near tall landscape hides you when it's time to get underneath if you're landlord frowns on maintenance.
Can I get away with not replacing the oil filter this time? I have 1 year and 5000 miles on the current oil (we don't drive her car too much). It's an OEM Mazda filter.
Totally up to you about changing the filter or not, but my personal recommendation is to go ahead and do it. Might be a moot point about getting under the car anyway, as I've read where some Mazda CX-5 owners can't use an extractor. I don't know for certain, but if not, then get a set of ramps instead of an extractor. Fit a Fumota valve or Valvomax to simplify the draining process directly into a container. Since the filter appears to be vertical, you can use a large plastic soda cup to surround the filter and catch any oil as you remove it. Sounds like it's once a year so not too much trouble and should be way less messy if you do a drain pan valve/plastic cup filter trick.
Some years ago, I was working at a construction site and watched a guy change the oil on his pickup inside the building, dumping the oil right there on the dirt (this was before the floor was fine graded and poured with concrete). Plumbers, electricians, laborers, concrete finishers etc were working all around him, totally unaware. When he finished, he moved the truck out of the way and kicked a bunch of loose dirt over the oil spill so no one would notice it. The real kicker is this: It was one of those huge regional post offices, so being a quasi-governmental project it had about a million safety and environmental inspectors (they even had inspectors to check COI for all your materials and additional inspectors to record race and gender of each contractor's employees). How he got away with it with all that oversight still amazes me. I think I was the only one who saw it.
When I lived in an apartment I did them at my parents' house. The apartment had a strict "no working on vehicles" policy. Over the years I had got away with changing brakes, wheel bearings .. smaller things but didn't want to go through anything that could make a mess. Then a few months before I moved, one of my neighbors was doing head gaskets on his 4.3l S10. He said they okayed it. Then I did oil changes there ...
Buy some super duper filter and change it every couple of oil changes if your engine is clean, maybe at 10k or 15k. Get an oil extractor and suck the old oil out from the dipstick tube, pour in fresh oil, done.
Find a friend with a house or find a parking lot to change the filter when its time.
Find a friend with a house or find a parking lot to change the filter when its time.
I used to live in downtown Vancouver in a hole in the sky roughly 580 sq ft. It was actually a great place to live and I had underground parking where I was able to get away with a fair bit of mechanical work, but I never did an oil change there simply because cleanup could be fairly extensive. I ended up renting a single car garage just outside of the downtown area that I could bicycle to easily. I also had several friends who had homes with garages that were willing to let me do some work there, but the best setup was through the friends that owned a shop and another who had access to a hangar at the airport.
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I was about to say the same thing. I hate wrenching without my headlamp, even in daylight. The ones they give out for free at Harbor Freight with the battery pack separated in the back of the headband are actually pretty good if anyone wants to try one out for minimal money. My preferred headlamp has an easily swappable 18650 battery so I don't have to stop using to plug in and recharge or burn through AAA batteries.
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I live in a big city and I do mine by paying the folks at the shop. I use a shop that I trust. They use Motul for the euro vehicles (I have a VW).
+ 1. Buy the oil there and drop off the used oil there. One stop oil change. Use their bathroom to clean up.I suggest the Walmart parking lot.
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Once lived in an apartment with a parking garage. Wasn’t prohibited in the lease but was the kind of place where eyebrows would be raised. Needed to replace a stripped lug the day before a planned road trip. Woke up at 4am on a weekend and got the job done before most people were waking up. Only people leaving for work that early were a few folks in scrubs. Got kind of bold after that and did extractor oil changes, brakes and a valve cover gasket before moving out.
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Back of parking lot
JHZR2
Staff member
When I lived in an apartment over 20 years ago, I had ramps and I just used a far corner of the lot where I usually parked but nobody else did. Fortunately I lived in a complex with large lots, so there was plenty of parking. If parking was tight I can see the challenge.
If it was a particularly big job I’d usually go to my parents’ home for the weekend and do it.
If it was a particularly big job I’d usually go to my parents’ home for the weekend and do it.
