Is it not a good idea to buy freshly blended oil?

Joined
Jul 22, 2025
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See, if you buy a jug of milk that is good for one month, it's not like the milk will wait for one month and then suddenly go bad. It goes bad gradually. Is oil like that too? They say that oil is good for up to 4 years, but it's not like the oil will wait for 4 years and then suddenly go bad. Shouldn't we buy fresh oil from Walmart each time we change our oil? Pennzoil jugs at Walmart right now say June 2025 on the jug. In a couple of months it will probably say August 2025. Walmart sells so much oil, jugs vanish.
 
I don't know that the milk comparison is really a good one.

Milk reaches a point where it definitely goes bad. I know only a few insane individuals that will drink milk after it has started to curdle, and most of us have a point well before that, that we won't drink it. It seems that the change, from fresh to spoiled, is on a curve. IDK for sure. Perhaps we have someone here that does?

Motor oil on the other hand, really has no expiration date. Except for the inconvenience of fallout of additives, I don't know of any real disadvantage of using 4 or 5 year old motor oil. I haven't seen anyone here report that they had to replace rod bearings after using old motor oil. I vaguely recall Blackstone Labs running some testing on some very old motor oil, and even ran it in some older engines, for which the oil was spec'd for, with no bad consequences.

This isn't the article I'm thinking of, but here is one where Blackstone tested some 14 year old M1, and found it still meeting specs.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/motor-oil-age-doesnt-matter-as-much-as-mileage-study.

Is it good to be using 15 year old motor oil? Perhaps it might be wise to not do any extended runs with it, but from what we read, it will still work. Is motor oil that just hit the shelf going to protect an engine any better than some that has been in a stash for 3 or 4 years? Nothing we have seen here shows anything to support that theory.
 
Okay what about the virgin oil in the little Oil Analyzer sample bottle? How long can you wait for to send that for analysis?
 
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