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From: C. Marin Faure (no email)
Date: Sat Dec 13 2003 - 00:33:51 EST
From:
Subject: TWL: "Solera" oil change system
>Every 20 engine hours I bleed a
scant quart of oil out of the engine by opening the valve slightly and
directing the flow into an empty 1 quart plastic oil bottle. I then add a
new quart of oil to the engine. The capacity of the engine's small sump is
5 quarts so most of the oil is effectively changed every 100 hours.
Hmm..... I wonder about this. A friend used to change the oil in his car
every 3000 miles, but he'd ony change the filter every other oil change. I
guess to save money. Anyway, he stopped doing this when someone pointed
out that what he was doing on the "in between" oil changes was essentially
pouring a guart of dirty oil into the new oil.
So I wonder if the method you describe actually gives you any real benefit.
You take out one quart of dirty oil, leave in four, which contaminates the
quart of clean oil a fair amount I should think. Then you keep run the
engine another twenty hours, putting more soot, acids, whatever, into the
oil, then you drain out one quart, add one fresh quart which is promptly
contaminated by the remaing four quarts of dirty oil, run twenty more
hours, and so on. It seems to me that what you are really doing is
maintaining a permanently dirty oil condition in the engine. Maybe not as
dirty as the oil would be at the end of a 100 hour oil change interval, but
pretty dirty nevertheless since your ratio of clean oil to dirty oil is
never greater than one to four.
If you run the engine for 100 hours or whatever oil change interval you
use, then change it all plus the filter, you now start with completely
clean oil. Over the next 100 hours, the oil gradually gets dirty, and then
you change it again.
I guess the question to be answered is, which process gives the engine more
"time" to run on clean, or relatively clean oil? I'm thinking it takes
some sort of math formula to figure this out, and there's a good reason I'm
a film producer and not a mathematician. But it would seem to me it would
be better for an engine to get clean oil periodically instead of running
forever on dirty oil.
Now I understand your reasoning for doing this to avoid having to change
the oil at an inconvenient time during a longer voyage, and in this context
it seems like a good solution. But if someone decided this would be a
smart way to operate all the time as a way to avoid messy oil changes or
save money, I wonder if they would be making a mistake.
_______________
C. Marin Faure
GB36-403 "La Perouse"
Bellingham, WA
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