Leaking hydraulic lifts mean its time for a change

By David Wegbreit

For months, you’ve been slipping a few extra gallons of oil into your in-ground lift on the sly. You know that extra oil is going somewhere. It’s time to admit it: You have a broken, leaking lift, and you need to replace it.

In the best case scenario, removing an in-ground lift is fairly painless. In 40 years of business, Bill Potter has never had to deal with a serious leak and the resulting contaminated soil. Most of the time, the president and founder of Triangle Service Equipment just unbolts the tops of the pistons, pulls the plungers out and pumps out the remaining oil. The pit can be cemented over and only the steel casings of the lift remain. Most of the time, these are flush with the floor. Other, more complicated cases may involve saw cutting the floor around the lift, removing concrete and soil and pulling out remaining piping jack and tank assembly.

But in the worst case, rust has eaten away at the steel side of the lift. Every time a mechanic topped the lift off, he was bleeding a little more oil into the ground. On one recent job, Pete Corsi, sales and installation coordinator for Total Tool, saw a garage pouring a 55-gallon drum of oil into their lifts every two months for a year.

“If you’re adding oil, then you have a problem underground and you know it. You probably ought to stop and figure out what’s going on first,” Corsi said.

If a garage has been pouring oil in this manner, they can be certain they’ll have contaminated soil beneath their pit, and some considerable clean up lies ahead of them. If this hasn’t happened, a garage still might have contaminants to consider. After 20 years and hundreds of thousands of miles on the road, oil, grease and containments picked up off the roadway can collect in a lift’s pit. Sometimes this can seep through the cement walls of the pit and into the surrounding soil.

According to John Walker, automotive service manager for Minnesota Petroleum, garages can have a testing company bore into the shop floor to sample the soil before the job starts for anywhere from $600 to $1,500. Operators can also perform a hydrostatic test, inducing pressure into the lift to see if there is a leak. These reports let garages and in-ground lift removers like him know about the extent of the job ahead.

If there’s a leak, most of the time it doesn’t reach too far. Unlike fuel, oil is viscous and won’t travel much in the soil. Most contamination collects around the rear piston. Corsi estimated 60 percent of the soil he excavates from a contaminated site is actually clean. Still, even if only a small portion of the soil is contaminated, excavating and disposing of it can be costly and no one wants potentially contaminated soil in their backyard.

“You hear ‘contaminated soil’ and everyone gets scared. Everyone wants to run from it,” Corsi said.

Usually, local environmental firms will come out to a site and scoop samples of the soil from all around the hole. Testers can perform some on-spot rests, but usually send soil to a lab. According to Denny Coughlin, director of maintenance for Minneapolis Public Schools, this kind of testing is to district’s benefit. Disposing of contaminated soil can cost around $120 per cubic yard. So, districts may want to factor the cost of a potential clean up into the cost of removing an old lift

Once a contractor removes potentially contaminated soil, he puts it on plastic, wraps the soil and leaves the district to find someone to haul the soil away. Disposing of soil usually means either burning it or chopping it up and turn it into blacktop.

The Environmental Protection Agency specifically excludes in-ground lifts from their oil spill regulations. When the agency began regulating in-ground storage tanks in the 1980s, it reasoned that poor performance would signal to a leak early on and there was little chance of major contamination. But states and in some cases individual cities may have their own requirements for reporting and cleaning up spills, so its important to ask about local regulations before starting a job.

In the past, the potential hassle of cleaning up a spill from an in-ground lift turned some to above-ground solutions. Four-post, parallelogram and mobile lifts could be purchased for less and didn’t come with the potential difficulty and expense of big clean-ups.

But proponents say in-ground lifts have gotten better, and Roger Perlstein, heavy-duty sales manager for Rotary Lift, said the customers are coming back.

Unlike older lifts, which were exposed to or often buried directly in the dirt and covered with cement for the last foot, the new generation of lifts, like Rotary’s MOD 30, are housed in casing to contain leaks if they happen.

Bob Chastain, founder and president of Indiana Automotive Equipment, said fixing a leak in one of these newer lifts is easy. Because contaminates are caught in the bathtub-like casing around the lift, he doesn’t need to do costly excavation or soil removal.

In-ground lifts have also taken other steps towards being green. For one, today’s lifts tend to use less oil. Mohawk Lift’s recently introduced in-ground lift uses 24 gallons of oil compared to as much as 80 gallons in the older generation of lifts. Additionally, today’s lifts demand less electricity and can be run on a vegetable-based, biodegradable oil.

While some of these changes be attributed to the high cost of clean up, Perlstein said a big driver has been cities’ and schools’ interest in running cleaner shops.

“We all have something in our gut that tells us we’re killing the planet,” he said.