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.
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.
