is antifreeze a good wood preservative

Today I want to talk about DIY wood preservatives. If you like making wood projects that spend time out in the weather, is there a low-cost effective remedy you can use to keep your hard work from rotting from moisture besides paint stains or epoxy?

Well, There just might be. Back in the 1990s, a man by the name of Dave Carnell published online a short article titled chemotherapy for wood rot. Dave was a chemical engineer that had worked with antifreeze for Dupont. Dave was an interesting guy, his career spanned 40 years at Dupont and as a young man served on a destroyer in the Pacific in ww2.

Dave experimented with homemade wood preservatives using ethylene glycol and borates. He provided a very specific set of instructions on how a person could make a very effective DIY wood preservative. As the years went by and he continued to experiment and review the wood samples he had treated, Dave eventually concluded that plain antifreeze with ethylene glycol worked as well as the chemical formula he created with the borate. He claimed the antifreeze penetrated faster and deeper.

Dave passed away in 2010 at the age of 89. If you read the online forums that discuss Daves work, you will see people who admit they never tried his method claim it would never work as ethylene glycol will dissipate in the air or when exposed to water in just a few days making it a short-term remedy. However, there are many people who tried using antifreeze with ethylene glycol as dave had done who claim to have received good results at protecting their wood from rot and fungus and mold for several years.
Dave was always confident in his online remarks that the ethylene glycol was absorbed into the cells of the wood and did not just lie on the surface and once inside the cells tended to stay there.

Ethylene glycol is very toxic. One of the most dangerous aspects of the liquid is it has a sweet taste and animals or children have been known to taste it and consume it causing severe injury or death. I will provide a link to the MSDS Material Safety Data Sheet so you can see the toxicity and handling instructions should you decide to use antifreeze. I am not recommending you use antifreeze or responsible for any consequences should you do so,, but I am letting you know there is anecdotal evidence that ordinary antifreeze with ethylene glycol is is a very effective and cheap wood preservative, one that I would use in outdoor wood projects in a prudent manner. I would not use antifreeze on wood used in an enclosed space on a boat or anywhere it may come in contact with food or water or if the wood was to be sanded or cut later as to release dust that could be harmful.

There is some antifreeze that contains propylene glycol and not ethylene glycol. Propylene glycol is not the same chemical as ethylene glycol and will not be effective according to Dave.
Dave passed away some years ago but his experiments, DIY chemical formulas, and conclusions regarding using antifreeze are still online, I will provide a link to the video description.

An interesting side note. Dave wrote that he suffered from a chronic case of athletes foot under his toenail all of his life. His dermatologist told him it was incurable. Dave applied the liquid to his toe and in time the toenail grew back and the skin turned into a healthy pink color.

Dave experimented with undiluted etifreeze. Unfortunately, he did not give a brand name of the antifreeze he used or the ethylene glycol concentration that was in the antifreeze.

If I was making an outdoor wood project or even a small wooden boat and I was concerned about it rotting out over time, I would not hesitate to try using plain antifreeze with ethylene glycol as an experiment to see if it would stop the fungus and mold destroying the wood.
You can apply paint and finishes over wood treated with antifreeze. Experiments by the Gougeon brothers, the famous marketers of their own brand of epoxy, revealed that epoxy can be applied over wood treated with ethylene glycol with no bonding issues.
If you do decide to use antifreeze as a wood preservative for your project after reviewing the safety issues and anecdotal evidence. Or have done so in the past, please leave a comment on your results.
Thanks for watching guys, I add new videos every week for the last ten years. Don't forget to check out my playlists and people I feature on my channel and you can find more information in the video description.
See ya out there.

Ethylene Glycol
MSDS
http://www.sciencelab.com/msds.php?msdsId=9927167
Dave Carnell's boatbuilding pages
http://www.angelfire.com/nc3/davecarnell/rot.html

Robb Moffett
Robb's Homemad3e Life

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