Reclaiming fuel contaminated oil

[oil pan 4]

There are block heaters that will preheat the car to 150F, they can cause damage if they aren’t watched carefully.

Preheating the engine will allow it to much more rapidly reach operating temperature reducing dillusion

All true. That would help especially during the winter time.

 

[oil pan 4]

Try using Mobil 1 hybrid oil.

I don't think fuel dilution cares which motor oil it's ruining. At 5% to 6% fuel the oils additive packages is kind of ruined.

 

[53' Stude]

The main reason I do oil changes on my wife's car is fuel dilution, because its a direct injected hybrid. I hate effing gasoline DI.
The only thing that fixes fuel dilution is running it on the highway for extended time or changing the oil. This car is driven about 8 miles each way when my wife goes to work or less when we go to the store, then occasionally do road trips and those seem to happen less frequently now.
To get the oil from a stinky 4% to 5% of fuel down to less stinky 2% takes about an hour drive at 75mph, so that's an hour plus about 2 gallons of gasoline just to get an improvement and it's not a great improvement.
To really drive the fuel out of the oil it needs more like 4 to 5hr of driving at 75mph that will get it below a half percent, I did dump the oil and pull a sample that time, had I known it was less than a half percent I would have ran that oil longer.
That's a lot of time, miles on the car, gas money and tire wear.
So simply dumping and refilling $25 worth Pennzoil platinum looks pretty appealing.
What if there was a 3rd option.
Just cleanly and nearly remove the oil from the car then simply heat the oil up to drive off the fuel?
Even better do it under a vacuum.
Yeah, yeah ya, I know it would never be worth it to get a vacuum pump and build a heated vacuum dryer tank to save $25 worth of PP twice a year and I agree.
But what if I already had all that stuff?
I've had my little 2 stage vacuum pump since forever, since the early 2000s.
Back around 2006 I built my first heated vacuum drying tank for waste vegetable oil, then in 2007 I built a bigger better replacement, went on deployment, came back found the entire areas supply of WVO was locked down by some evil vegetable oil racquet and all I could get was small amounts of WVO from one place. So I never used my second generation heated vacuum dryer and it's been shelved ever since.
I'm thinking add an oil drain valve to the car as the oil drain plug is smartly elevated above the road surface, that's the only part I would have to buy and the car is done. Then take my vacuum dryer tank weld in a bung for a tempature gauge (already have a temperature gauge in my junk collection, have weld in bungs in my bunghole box) and there's already bung to connect a hose for filling and draining the tank. I also have a used hydraulic hose and line collection, so don't even have to buy a hose. So when it's together all I have to do is suck the hot oil out of the oil pan after a drive with the vacuum dryer, run it, heat the oil up a little bit more that normal under vacuum and push the oil back into the oil pan with compressed air the same way it came out and the whole process takes the same amount of time as doing an oil change hopefully. Maybe add some recreational plumbing so I can pull samples.
If it works switch to a better oil like amsoil or hpl. As of now it's not worth wasing great oil on fuel dilution driven oci ranging 3,300 to 6,600 miles.

I think I’ll let safety Kleen “re-refine my fuel diluted oil.

 

[Rmay635703]

Or better, put it in a scientifically proven riding mower.



In fact, if you run it in the 260 F / ASTM 6922 riding mower, you could clean it up and put it back in the car.

Then when it gets diluted again, put it back in the mower to clean it. Keep alternating between the two.

You might never have to buy another quart of oil again!

20wt oil in most mowers results in self changing oil, he could just dump it in the mower removing the requirement to dispose of the oil


0F is well within the limits of a 10w?? Winter rating, I’ve ran synthetic 10w30 down to -15F, just let the car heat up a bit before driving, sure probably causes some damage but likely no more than fuel dillusion

 

[oil pan 4]

I think I’ll let safety Kleen “re-refine my fuel diluted oil.

Agreed. It's not worth it to get a vacuum dryer setup even for 2 vehicles plagued by fuel dilution.

 

[kschachn]

0F is well within the limits of a 10w?? Winter rating, I’ve ran synthetic 10w30 down to -15F, just let the car heat up a bit before driving, sure probably causes some damage but likely no more than fuel dillusion

If you reach the pumpability limit of that 10W rated oil you'll have a lot more damage than what is caused by fuel dilution.

 

[Hall]

I gave up reading that "plan" of yours and will just suggest, use an oil like Supertech and change it every X thousand miles and move on.

 

[Triple_Se7en]

Step up to the next higher viscosity and don't let the 5% Diluters Club Members bother you. That percentage will not lower wear protection.

Want to toss & turn in bed every night? Then creep up right next to the 10% Club Members. They keep Kleenex tissue boxes on a pillow next to them during the night -a clothespin across their noses, to fend-off the smell of gas and leave their pack of cigarettes and lighter on the kitchen table.
Otherwise, they have terrifying nightmares of Smokey The Bear chasing them.

 

[oil pan 4]

20wt oil in most mowers results in self changing oil, he could just dump it in the mower removing the requirement to dispose of the oil


0F is well within the limits of a 10w?? Winter rating, I’ve ran synthetic 10w30 down to -15F, just let the car heat up a bit before driving, sure probably causes some damage but likely no more than fuel dillusion

If fuel dilution reclamation doesn't work for whatever reason and I declare it a failure then cleanly catching the cars fuel dilution oil and using it in mowers would be an acceptable alternative.
My cutoff combination for an oils winter rating and temperature is 16,000 cP. A fresh 10w oil should be fine at -13f, but goes from the recommended temperature -13f and 7,000 cP up to 60,000 cP real quick. Plus if your 10w oil has nearly 5,000 miles on it then it may already be at or over 16,000 cP at the normally okay temperature of -13f.
So I try to stay well away from that 16,000 cP mark for my winter rating and temperature combo.
For mu dodge pickup it gets a 5w because it's only going to get one oil change per year as I don't put a lot of miles on it. So hypothetically it's well ran 5w oil with say 3,000 to 4,000 miles is at least as viscous as a new 10w oil at cold temperatures. So a well used 5w oil should still be acceptable for even the coldest temperatures here.

 

[oil pan 4]

Step up to the next higher viscosity and don't let the 5% Diluters Club Members bother you. That percentage will not lower wear protection.

Want to toss & turn in bed every night? Then creep up right next to the 10% Club Members. They keep Kleenex tissue boxes on a pillow next to them during the night.

I already did. The recommended oil is 5w-20 and I'm running 5w-30. So even if the additives are too diluted to do everything they're supposed to at least the viscosity is right.

 

[oil pan 4]

I gave up reading that "plan" of yours and will just suggest, use an oil like Supertech and change it every X thousand miles and move on.

Unfortunately we all can't be blessed with short attention spans.

 

[kschachn]

As someone who performed numerous vacuum distillations in an earlier career, I can tell you that performing the distillation is the easy part. Determining what you've done and to what degree is the harder part. What was your plan to determine how much fuel was in the initial sample and then to determine how much you've removed? We used UV-VIS on the compound we were distilling but I doubt that would be effective on motor oil.

Also watch out for VM degradation as well. Fuel dilution can irreversibly harm the VII, despite the poster above that assures you 5% dilution "will not lower wear protection".

 

[tolian21]

I hope you already using thicker oil to compensate for fuel dilution that drops viscosity

 

[cptbarkey]

Fuel diluted oil should be great for fall/spring brush fires. Save it for me and i'll swing by with a drum.

 

[oil pan 4]

As someone who performed numerous vacuum distillations in an earlier career, I can tell you that performing the distillation is the easy part. Determining what you've done and to what degree is the harder part. What was your plan to determine how much fuel was in the initial sample and then to determine how much you've removed? We used UV-VIS on the compound we were distilling but I doubt that would be effective on motor oil.

Also watch out for VM degradation as well. Fuel dilution can irreversibly harm the VII, despite the poster above that assures you 5% dilution "will not lower wear protection".

What temperature do you recommend to burn off the gasoline and not too much of the oil?
It can be a destructive test or not.
I can pull a sample, heat it up to whatever temperature in an open container and weigh it again.
I'm thinking pull 2 samples.
One sample straight off the engine, used oil that stinks of gasoline, weigh it, cook it and weigh it again.
Second sample after the oil reclamation attempt, pull the sample, weigh it, cook it and weigh it again. Repeat as needed.
Maybe pull a 3rd sample of virgin 5w-30 PP, weigh it, cook it and weigh. This time to come up with a correction factor or margin of error. Ideally cooking a virgin oil sample doesn't change it's weight by say more than a half percent or so.
This would not be a regular test as it would take too long and defeats the time justification as I would like the whole ordeal to "take about as long as doing an oil change" and just use it to determine a range of appropriate times and tempatures for vacuum reclamation.

 

[oil pan 4]

Fuel diluted oil should be great for fall/spring brush fires. Save it for me and i'll swing by with a drum.

I already have plenty. I use it to light wood chips in my coal furnace.

 

[oil pan 4]

I hope you already using thicker oil to compensate for fuel dilution that drops viscosity

Yeah recommend oil is 5w-20 and I've been running 5w-30 for a while now.

 

[53' Stude]

I already have plenty. I use it to light wood chips in my coal furnace.

Wait; does it get real cold in eastern New Mexico? I bet you don’t have bituminous or hard coal like us in PA do

 

[kschachn]

You're not burning it off, you're distilling it out of the oil. You'd definitely need to distill a hydrocarbon like that under vacuum, whatever the mixture boils at is what you get.

Not my setup but very similar to what we used in the lab (vacuum pump not shown). If you're doing quarts or gallons you need larger apparatus.

 

[oil pan 4]

Why not just drive aggressively to build oil temperature to 220-240?

Running the car about as fast as I dare in Texas about 80mph still takes well over an hour of driving to knock the fuel dilution down a few percentage.