Is WD-40 A Degreaser? What You Need To Know Before Using

Given its numerous practical uses around the garage, WD-40 is one of the handiest products you can keep around. It silences squeaking joints with ease, can make for easy rust removal, and even cleans up certain surfaces with a quick spray and a swipe. Of course, there are plenty of things you should never use WD-40 on at the risk of damaging whatever surface has been exposed to it. But is it safe to assume you can use any WD-40 product as a degreaser? The answer is a bit more involved than you might think.

The regular multi-purpose WD-40 will break down and remove grease from a variety of surfaces, but as it also acts as a lubricant, it's likely to leave greasy-feeling residue behind. However, WD-40 isn't just one product, but an entire brand. That means that some offerings are much better at certain tasks than others. You should take a look at the label of your WD-40 container before getting started to see if your specific product is suitable for the degreasing task at hand.

If the WD-40 product you're working with isn't the best for degreasing and you want something you know will get the job done right, the brand can still help.

Over the years, WD-40 has branched out to help out in a host of different situations. If you want a complete clean when degreasing, the WD-40 brand offers full-on degreaser and cleaner pods. These can be added to water to create a high-strength degreasing cleaner that can be safely used on multiple surfaces. Alternatively, WD-40's lineup includes specialized degreasers designed with more specific jobs in mind.

One of these products is the machine and engine degreaser foaming spray, which, as the name suggests, is meant to give machinery and engines thorough degreasing without harming them. The WD-40 website advertises it as low-residue, so it should make a world of difference without leaving grime behind. The foaming bike degreaser works in a similar fashion. If needed, you can also try out WD-40's industrial strength degreaser to handle more intensive applications in industrial settings.