quote:

Originally posted by 19tass:

quote:

Originally posted by konata88:
What do oil gauges measure?

Actual oil "gauges" measure engine oil pressure. Oil life monitors, as previously noted, take into account various driving parameters and calculate when a change is due (theoretically). This may not always be an accurate assessment though.

Yep, engine temp, RPM's and engine hours just to name a few. Most if not all manufacturers use a synthetic blend at a minimum now.

quote:

Originally posted by konata88:
What do oil gauges measure?

Oil pressure. If you note falling oil pressure it's one of a couple of different problems, neither of which is good: either a loss of oil volume (think blood loss in a human injury) or pump failure (think heart issues in a human).

We have three vehicles, all out of warranty. My F150 has about 87,000 miles on it. I switched to full syn soon after purchase. I run it about 7,500 miles between oil changes, but I do pay more attention to the vehicle monitor than mileage. My wife is a little more finicky about her Jeep Wrangler. I try to convince her that 7,500 is ok, but she usually changes around 5,000. We also have a touring car that just is driven in warm weather months. Oil is changed yearly, miles driven does not exceed 5,000.

Every 15,000 miles when the computer tells me to. Seems fairly accurate based on what I see, at least in my case.

I have four vehicles and all treated differently as far a oil changes are concerned:

(1) V Model Caddy full syn oil changed annually due to Caddy is driven under 3,000 miles a year. Only 18,000 on the clock 2006 model with vette engine.

(2) Tundra dino + syn oil changed annually due to tundra driven under 5,000 miles a year. This 2009 have under 50,000 on clock.

(3) Ranger dino + syn oil changed at 5,000 as vehicle is driven over 10,000 annually. This is a 2010 with around 104,000 on the clock.

(4) Sonoma dino oil changed between 3,000 and 3.500 miles as this GMC is driven over 30,000 miles annually. Has over 332,000 on the clock

All you guys changing your full synthetic at 5,000 miles are wasting your money, IMO

But the oil change shops and dealers LOVE YOU.

Every 10k for my 2012 Tundra for last 165K. Every 5-7k for my ‘02 Land Cruiser for the last 264k. I hope my negligence doesn’t lead to premature wear.

The oil life monitor on my Mustang factors time in it's calculation. I change the oil before putting it into winter storage (typically late Nov pending the weather) and when I take it out in the spring (Mar/Apr) the monitor says 40-50%. To the monitor it is 4 months old. I do not start the car at all during the winter - unless it is nice enough to take it out for at least an hour drive to get it nice and hot to burn off moisture in the engine and exhaust system (none of those 5-10 minute idles in the garage.) I use Redline 5W-50 full synthetic in it.

On the F150 and Escape we bought the every 3 Month/3000 Mile oil change for life packages and they get done pretty close to 3-4 Month frequency. The oil life monitors in them are typically around 60%. Ford uses Motorcraft synthetic blend. They don't say anything about I could go longer - I paid for that package and that's what they get.

My wife also drives a 2012 Odyssey. I try to change it around 10,000 miles when the computer indicates it is necessary. Sometimes it doesn't get changed until 14,000 miles. I use Mobil 1. The van has 226,000 miles now and it has no engine problems and doesn't use oil between changes.

I change my oil every month or 1,000 miles because it’s cheap insurance and my grandpa told me to.





Ok, I’m full of shit. I follow the manufacturer’s recommendation. Last vehicle was 10,000 miles. Drove it for 312,000 miles. Currently vehicle is 7,500 I believe.

Changing oil before the recommended point is a waste of time and money (outside of special circumstances)

It is my understanding that the oil monitors keep track of how much gasoline goes through the engine since the monitor was last reset. Then, based on a certain number of gallons used, it calls for an oil change. If you are driving on the highway under light load, I would expect that you would go a high number of miles before an oil change was called for. On the other end of the spectrum, if you were on a racetrack running wide open throttle all of the time, and getting about 3 - 4 miles to the gallon I would expect that the oil change interval would be much lower.

I have seen photos of BMW valve trains and cam covers from engines that followed the oil monitor change recommendations and they did not look good. A lot of build up and sludge. I change my oil every 7500 miles and at 88k miles when I did the cam cover gasket, everything looked very good under the cover.

I think getting your oil tested is a waste of money, unless you have several gallons of oil you may need to change or have some specific wear problem you are trying to diagnose. The cost of the test equals the cost of 5 quarts of oil. Assuming you do it yourself, you as well just put the money into the oil and change it.

The monitors are an estimate at best and really more of a reminder than anything. Keep in mind the monitor doesn’t know anything about the condition of your oil or whether it’s conventional or synthetic. I try and stick with close to 5,000 for conventional and 7,000 for synthetic. You’re not really saving that much trying to stretch your oil changes and you are risking the most expensive component in doing so.

quote:

you can send a sample to Blackstone labs for analysis

A friend would do just that. He's always try to get me to do it and kept telling me I could get much more mileage out of the oil. This was being done for the motors in our Harlkeys. I stayed with the 3K using full synthetic. While he used the same oil, he would continue to stretch it based on those reports.

A while down the road his motor started making odd sounds and he found out the bearing were gone. Related?? Who knows but it was costly when it's out of warranty.

quote:

Originally posted by PowerSurge:
The problem with having an oil sample tested is that they don’t test for particles small enough to make it through the oil filter, but too large for them to test. They don’t even have a category on their testing analysis for that. They basically just test the oil for TBN, tell you how much active additive you have left, if there are any wear metals in the sample (ppm) and then tell you to run your oil for a longer or shorter oil change interval.

Another thing I notice is that a lot of these oil life gauges don’t adjust enough for stop and go traffic. On my Si, it will only reduce the oil change interval by 200-300 miles as compared to all highway driving. Stop and go traffic used to be classified as severe duty calling for a lot shorter oil change intervals.

This is false information. I take many oil samples in my business and they're not for BS $3-5k car engines. A few of those gas inboards in yachts, but the engines I'm pulling samples on are generally $150,000 (CAT C18 ACERT 1150 hp) to $1 million per engine (2600HP MTU 16v2000). SOP for pulling a sample is get the oil hot by letting the engine idle to temperature and get all of the metal suspended. Stick new 1/4" rigid icemaker plastic hose down the dipstick till it hits the bottom of the pan and insert in a special hand pump that goes on the sample bottle and keeps all samples isolated. Tag and send to the lab. Samples get pulled at every oil change, sometimes in-between too. But we pull them because there are several ways saltwater could get into the oil. Oil cooler and turbo aftercoolers are saltwater cooled (via heat exchanger) so could leak into oil.

I can assure you that if the sample is done correctly at the lab, it will measure EVERY bit of metal/type/amount regardless of size, there is no size too big for the machine. I get a print out that lists every type of metal in the oil, amount in ppm, as well as wear additives in oil, condition of oil, other contaminates in oil (fuel/salt/water/Sulphur/etc.) and many other things.

NOW, sampling your oil 1 time is almost useless, because you have no baseline to spot a trend, ie copper is higher than last oil change...….some engines due to brand/type or driving do exhibit higher wear metals in their oil just because. It will tell you the life left in the oil. Oil should be changed annually at a minimum regardless of mileage.

That being said, your local Caterpillar dealer is your BEST bang for the buck for an oil sample, much cheaper than Blackstone and a perfect sample. Just walk in their and buy their S.O.S. sample kit, I pay $22 each. You get a pre-paid shipping label, the shipping bottle, the oil sample bottle, the icemaker hose. Put your sample in their, drop it in the mail, and you have it in your email in a few days.

Here's an example of what the data looks like:
https://media.noria.com/sites/...10_butler_report.jpg


I'm going to a 64' yacht tomorrow to deliver it over 3 days, it takes over 100 gallons to do an oil change on this yacht between the 2 engines most of it (C32 acert CATS), 2-20kw Onan gens, and the 2 gears. While a yacht owner doesn't want to pay to replace a $400k engine, they don't want to pay $6k to do an oil change early either for no need and it's about 2 days labor for 2 guys to do the annual service. Think of the labor of just moving the oil to and from the yacht and disposing of it.


Nothing really stays in the bottom of the pan, unless you haven't changed oil in 100k miles and the bottom of the pan is carboned over with coal. The oil pump pick up sucks the oil from within 1/2" of the bottom of the pan and with quite a bit of velocity.

I can guarantee you that nowadays, if you change the oil at the manufacturers recommended mileage, 99.9% of the time the oil sample will still be pretty good.

Timely thread to stumble across as I just finished an oil change on my daily.

It's a 2012 Grand Cherokee 5.7L V8 with 175,000 miles on it and the only thing that has ever been done to the motor was a water pump at 110,000. I have always followed the oil life monitor recommendation which seems to be around 10-12k miles give or take and I've always run 87 because 89 is "recommended" not "required."

Fact is, the engine will outlast my interest in the truck at this point. The old 3k, 5k, 7k intervals don't really apply any more IMO, given today's cleaner burning fuels, better formulation oils, tighter tolerance engines and computer controlled and monitored systems. We all need to do what makes us comfortable but my experience with this SUV has been that following the monitor is plenty good enough.

I started oil analysis with the first oil change on my Mustang and will be keeping up with it, once a baseline is established after several changes, it's really interesting to look at and see what's happening inside the engine over time. I do feel it's a valuable tool and very affordable for what you get from Blackstone. For anyone wondering, here's what a report looks like:

One of the issues I have in this area is that the mfg's that I own (currently 4 different) all have a time limit as well as a mileage limit on maintenance. So it matters not a hoot what the minder says, the book says get the oil out at 6 months (example for Ford). So if you don't drive a zillion miles you are going to change it before the oil life says to change it. And for vehicles in warranty I do the book version of life. Once you are way past that pick your own strategy. There are merits to all of them but almost no data to support anyone's position. I (for one) don't think the mfg has a real interest in getting the maximum life from my vehicle so I tend to be conservative about their recommendations, including their instruments on oil life.

I have had 3 oil analysis done in the 90,000 miles of my F-150. All 3 were done by Blackstone labs. The oil minder seems to trip on 10,000 miles on this truck.

The first was 7500mi, oil was good they said take her out another 3000. Second was at 10,000 they said it should go another 2000. Number three was at 10,000 too it was the cleanest sample of them all, again they thought it could go out to 12,000 if I wanted to.

It’s nice to have a lab analysis to know exactly what’s going on. I ordered the kit online costs about $35 I think. Specify you want oil life test. My shop had no problem with sampling and were curious to see the results as well.

I’m not going to quote Jimmy’s post but only that that he doesn’t understand my post and there was nothing false in my post. Back to ignore.

I don't understand your post either. Yes for sure there are particles in your oil that are below the filter medium size chosen by the mfg. so what. There is no evidence that it matters otherwise the mfg would dramatically reduce the size of the filtered particles and in general across many different engine types they don't. as a small aside in the oil analysis business you can get anything you want tested (no I'm not talking the std products like CAT or Blackstone, and yes it costs) Filters can be designed to filter any particular size particle if you need it and I'm sure the mfg figure out the optimum based on several factors (like the need for a bypass on very fine filters when cold etc.). In any case oil samples can tell you a lot. But while I do them in my expensive engines all the time (side note for education I'm not sure why Jimmy123x is taking them out of the pan, my smaller CAT's all have a port for this, don't these big marine engines??) its not worth it to me on car motors where I know I'm changing the oil soon enough and I'm going to run it to destruction anyway.

One thing to be mindful of with this generation motor is the ECO mode which has caused some ring problems. Typically, I’m changing the oil on my 2012 Pilot every 5k or at 20%. Then I wait until the MM hits 15% to get the service codes

Yes and no.

Some of them are based on mileage alone. Some are based on engine hours. Some factor in idling and cold starts.

Most (all?) of them have govt mandated CAFE requirements that REQUIRE the manufacturer to extend the interval, even if it’s not in the best interest of the car. O while Toyota calls for 10,000 mile changes you could probably bet $1000 (and win) that a 7500 mile change is far better for the car.

And then, we come to modern, modern cars. You know, the latest technology cars on the road that have tiny , turbo charged and direct fuel injection into the cylinders, cars. These turbo charged direct injection cars are HARD on the oil. Many suffer from massive fuel dilution that we never saw with the old style port fuel injection. You run one of these fuel dilution monsters out to 10,000 miles with 2 quarts of fuel in the oil crankcase, and you are going to have a shortened engine life. Some manufacturers are seeing this problem and they are reprogramming the oil light to come on much sooner...

Basically, if you like your car get it changed at 40-50%. If you don’t, then run it down to 0-10%.

A synthetic do it yourself oil change cost $20. At a competent shop, $40. It’s not a lot of money to do it every 5k to 6k miles.