After 10 years and 500 hours if the deck rusts out on a push mower I'll jack up the engine and roll another deck under it.It seems like I remember seeing an analysis on the "no change" engines along these lines:
The "average" homeowner will probably mow around 40 times a year(once a week for the spring/summer/fall) and run the engine for about an hour every time they use it. That's 40 hours a year, which honestly is probably high(I'd guess a lot of people who spend an hour pushing have a yard big enough to consider a rider).
At the end of 10 years, the mower will have accumulated 400 hours give-or-take. Between the fairly high quality air filter used on the no-change engines and keeping the crankcase topped off with a quality oil, the estimated engine life is ~500 hours.
After 10 years, on a typical consumer grade mower, there's a decent chance the deck will be rotten, other parts will be worn out, and/or the typical owner will just be ready for something new by that point.
Even when I was mowing our yard with a $200 Wal-Mart mower with a no-oil-change engine(my wife bought it right after she bought the house we're in, which was about a year before I met her) I still changed the oil every year, but truth be told after ~4 years the deck was already getting a bit thin in spots(and I was pretty picky about cleaning it when I was done with it for the day). There wasn't a lot of steel there to begin with(so glad everything I use now is alloy). I don't know if it would have even made 10 years.
As to the OP's premise-it seems nutty to me, but at the same time their mower is probably getting fresher oil than 99% of the homeowner push mowers out there. Granted when I actually had to worry about changing mower oil(mine never gets intentionally changed now, or perhaps you could say I constantly change it) I almost always just used whatever partial bottle I had from a car oil change and called it a day. Most of the time it was Mobil1 5W-30, although at least once I had VR1 20W-50 in it. That made for fun starting that fall...
Yeah I dump those in a quart container and use them in whatever. That quart bottle with the jug left overs in it is usually empty.
That’s pretty much what I do.
I recall that AMOCO oil was dark from the get go. Not implying that it was re-refined or recycled oil in general. I bought many 1 gallon 10w40 jugs from K-Mart for under 6 dollars in the early 90's. I was broke then and I had to buy only the least expensive of what was available for my 1982 Toyota truck with the carbed 22r engine. I ran the cheapest oil filter I could find at the time which was the Fram PH-8A. I want to say that I could buy that filter for 1.50 when on sale at K-Mart. The truck always started even when it was below 20 degrees outside. Sometimes I had to really pump the gas pedal to get it going but when it fired up it was good to go.
Yeah I soak logs in used motor oil and burn them.What’s wrong with recycled
Oil of done properly and it let specs?? Guess nextgen was a bad idea too
“Used or reclaimed oil” should be recycled or possibly burned for power burned cleanly if possible. I care about my mower and Focus’s too much to pour dirty, nasty oil thru them. “Flush” or not: doesn’t sound healthy or practical.
I'm running 20w-50 Castrol GTX classic that was on Walmart clearance, till it runs out. My riding mower runs 260f or higher so it gets an oil that ends in 50.
Project farm tests seems to indicate that thinner oils like motor oil with anti wear additives are better than super thick oils with no anti wear additives. I can only guess it's because the thiner oil pumps easier, you get more of it and the anti wear additives.
I change the oil in my wife's car as early as 3500 miles during the winter due to fuel dilution. I was burning it as 4% gas in the oil burns pretty good. I bet it would be fine in a mower, the mower gets hot up to 260f which is way hotter than her cars oil gets and would burn off most of that gasoline.