My wife and I have three Subarus between us: a 2011 Forester non-turbo, a 2019 Crosstrek, and a 2021 WRX. (My wife's car, if you can believe it; I never drive it.)
I keep oil and filters stocked for these cars, and sometimes RockAuto has closeouts, so I have a small variety of filters on hand, and I was comparing them. I note the physical sizes are different and it made me wonder how much interchangeability there actually is.
Going by Purolator's parts finder website (not dedicated to Purolator, their lookup was just convenient), I find the following part numbers (leaving off the alpha prefixes that denote product line):
In Wix, the situation is:
My question in all this is, does it matter? If the catalogs list the larger and smaller filters interchangeable on one car, why can't I use either filter on any of the cars? It would be nice to stock only one filter instead of two sizes; and the WRX filter is larger and presumably has more filter area, whereas the others are little "peanut" filters - especially from Purolator, as you can see here with a size comparison:
The leftmost two are for the WRX (OEM and Puro respectively) and the other five are for the Crosstrek or 2012 Forester. According to the catalogs (and Subaru), a 2011 Forester can use any of these. The Mazda filter is a close match for the OEM Subaru Tokyo Roki filter the Crosstrek was built with and is identical in dimensions. You can see that the smaller Puro and ProLine (made by Puro) are really small, considerably smaller than the Baldwin and Champ.
Thoughts?
I keep oil and filters stocked for these cars, and sometimes RockAuto has closeouts, so I have a small variety of filters on hand, and I was comparing them. I note the physical sizes are different and it made me wonder how much interchangeability there actually is.
Going by Purolator's parts finder website (not dedicated to Purolator, their lookup was just convenient), I find the following part numbers (leaving off the alpha prefixes that denote product line):
- 2021 WRX, FA20F engine: 14459
- 2019 Crosstrek, FB20 engine: 14615
- 2011 Forester, FB25 engine: 14459 or 14615 (both are listed)
In Wix, the situation is:
- WRX: WL10078
- Crosstrek: 57055
- Forester (2011): 57055 or 57830
- Forester (2012): 57055 only
My question in all this is, does it matter? If the catalogs list the larger and smaller filters interchangeable on one car, why can't I use either filter on any of the cars? It would be nice to stock only one filter instead of two sizes; and the WRX filter is larger and presumably has more filter area, whereas the others are little "peanut" filters - especially from Purolator, as you can see here with a size comparison:
The leftmost two are for the WRX (OEM and Puro respectively) and the other five are for the Crosstrek or 2012 Forester. According to the catalogs (and Subaru), a 2011 Forester can use any of these. The Mazda filter is a close match for the OEM Subaru Tokyo Roki filter the Crosstrek was built with and is identical in dimensions. You can see that the smaller Puro and ProLine (made by Puro) are really small, considerably smaller than the Baldwin and Champ.
Thoughts?