I made a bit of a start yesterday but after adding then removing about a gallon and a half of hot water and washing up liquid, there was clearly a lot of work still to do and already I'd made a bit of a mess. This wasn't going to be quick - or end well.
A better solution(!) would be to flush it out with a hose and electric pump. Who knows, if I got the inflow and outflow roughly balanced, I could exchange the contents several times without significant drama. Conversely, if I cocked it up I could make a fine old mess.
So far, almost everything I've flushed out has been aqueous and most of the oil remains floating on the surface in clumps like a turd-coloured slick. It's going to be pretty much impossible to pump that out and it doesn't look as if it will mix with any kind of detergent and then be washed away.
I dug out the old hot water circulating pump that came from the house when we removed the Megaflow cylinder. It's not a Grundfos but I hoped it would pump reasonably well. However, no matter how I tried to prime it (even using a cold water hose), I couldn't get any flow going.
So I swapped over to the Grundfos pump that I was previously using as a coolant pump on the Blidgeport. That actually worked very nicely.
After a couple of fill / empty cycles, the bottom of the sump is visible finally. Still some turd-like floating excrescences are visible but it's a vast improvement.
I'm now pondering the option of removing the inspection cover on the end of the sump. It would release the residual contents, ideally into a shallow catch tray below. I could then clean the remaining crap out using wodges of paper towels. I don't think I'll manage it any other way.
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