Originally Posted By: Cujet
I live in Florida, where it's quite hot and humid most of the year. I own rural property, where there was no power. Also, the construction area needed the removal of standing water prior to the foundation. (long story for another day)
I purchased a Honda powered water pump, and let it run for days on end. It failed due to oil issues. It was replaced under warranty and the second one failed. Same problem, the stationary engine ran hot, the "recommended" 10W-30 oil was unable to protect under these conditions. I replaced that with a Kawasaki powered pump, switched to Mobil 1 15W-50 and have not had a
problem since. (I currently use the pump for irrigation)
Same goes for generators. After the hurricanes, there were months without power. I used M1 15W-50 with excellent results. My local area (population 10,000) were all on generator power. The number of failures were significant. All of them due to oil related issues. (lack of viscosity) Obviously, the load, the
heat, oil choice and oil change intervals all play a role.
My 385HP turbo Mazda also did well on heavier viscosity synthetics. I did try a 0W-20 oil in an attempt at reducing oil windage and friction. That resulted in a UOA with lead in the 250PPM range! That one mistake resulted in engine disassembly and overhaul. While it did not cause the engine to catastrophically fail, it did result in exceptionally rapid wear rates and "surprise",,,,,, massive
blow by.
My 4.6L Ford F150 had significantly better UOA's on 10W-30 M1 vs. the OEM's required 5W-20. 260,000+ miles later, I guess the UOA's were right! The cross hatch marks are still in the cylinders!
Same goes for my 5.4L F150. The engine simply sounds better on more viscous oil, the UOA's are better and so on....
Here in Florida, a thin oil will work just fine and I'm not saying it won't. However, under certain conditions, more viscosity is clearly better.
Interesting. I make my living with the 160cc Honda engine. I have 10 air compressors powered by this engine,then various princess auto 6500 watt generators. The summer hear here will peak at 40c but I'd say 28c is common all summer long. In the winter I use a 0w-30 syn in them and a 10w-30 conventional in the summer and I've never had an engine failure.
In fact the oil alert was unplugged on one of my generators. One of my crews ran that generator until it seized from no oil. They called me. I went over to their site,took off the rip cord,used a 1/2" breaker bar and got it to turn over. I poured the only fluid I had handy which was tranny fluid.
I started the engine and ran it for a couple of minutes while one of my guys went to the co-op to buy oil. I drained the tranny fluid,filled it with co-op branded 10w-30 and that generator is still in service today. This incident was 5 years ago.
So just the fact that you cooked 2 of those Honda engines baffles me since I have first hand experience "fixing" a seized one.
Ambient temp must really make a huge difference.
I am leaning to running all of our equipment on the D-MO SL co-op branded 0w-40. Great cold flow properties and it's a 40 grade which adds a bit of high temp security. And that oil claims to be 100% pao. For 27 bucks a gallon too.
