10,000 Mile Oil Changes Damaging Motors

[gaijin]

I've wondered about OCI in my 80 Series, which I only drive about 4K miles a year. What's the conventional Mud OCD thinking on that? I'm with the 5K mile OCI approach, but that's less than once a year for me.

There are many ways to overthink this one, but (after overthinking it) my best suggestion in your case is just change the oil and oil filter once every 12 months, irrespective of miles driven.

HTH

 

[gasman4u]

@bicycleagent003 another vote for at least once a year in your use case.

@Underdog I thankfully had heard about the glove
Box recirc flap shenanigans @Sandroad mentioned before I used the one free oil change at my local dealer early on (1k miles or so iirc). They didn’t give me any pushback about using it early - I was surprised. Thankfully, no missing bolts, etc when I finally got it back but it did take an inordinate amount of time imo for an oil change. I can only guess as to why that was, but overall decent experience. I’ve done all my own stuff since either at a specialty shop or by my own two hands.

 

[studawg]

I've wondered about OCI in my 80 Series, which I only drive about 4K miles a year. What's the conventional Mud OCD thinking on that? I'm with the 5K mile OCI approach, but that's less than once a year for me.

You should absolutely change it at the very least once a year, regardless of the number of miles driven. But depending on the type of miles driven, more frequent oil changes might be necessary. If any of those miles driven were short trips that dont allow the condensation to burn off, and especially if the vehicle is garaged (which can cause even more condensation), that oil needs to be changed closer to every 6 months. You might not need to change the filter, but you need to change the oil. Once the oil becomes diluted from repeated stops and starts that produce condensation, fuel dilution, etc...it provides much less protection.

Put it this way, oil with 2500 miles on it which were accumulated from 10 trips of 250 miles each is going to protect and lubricate much, much better than 2500 mile oil where the mileage was accumulated from 250 trips of 10 miles each. Just one short trip can introduce condensation and fuel dilution into the oil supply that affects the oils ability to lubricate and protect, at least for that next warm-up cycle.

I've really only recently learned about this while studying certain Porsche engines and their susceptibility to borescoring due to the cylinder linings that were used in certain years. The 1FZ block is certainly more wear-resistant than those. But the fact remains, how often you should change your oil depends not only on the number of miles driven, and not only on the amount of time since last change, but also how the engine was run over those miles and during that period of time. If you make an effort to being sure you actually drive it long enough to get it up to operating temp every single time you start you engine, then you can possibly go longer than either the mileage or the time recommendations. But environmental temperature changes can also have effects so, maybe not.

So I think its simply too general to say something like "your oil should be changed every 5k miles" OR something like "as long as you change your oil at least once a year, you will be fine". It just depends.

 

[vwynn]

we always see people running black stone labs reports on longer interval oils... im curious if we have seen people run samples of oil that has maybe 1500 miles on it but has been sitting for nearly a year?