Whats wrong over at Purolator?

If OCIs are pretty short then lower efficiency filtration has less impact than if OCIs are longer.

This doesn’t make much sense to me. If particles are there, they’re there. The sump will make many turnovers if the fluid therein, and larger particles that survive will do their damage.

You could argue that neither size range will be damaging, at which case the arguments are all just academic anyway.

If the engine is shedding wear materials, oci duration doesn’t make a whole lot of difference unless you’re relying on the dispersants, which is a different beast than media filtration.

Either you want a good filter to catch more smaller particles, regardless of oci, or you don’t.
 
This doesn’t make much sense to me. If particles are there, they’re there. The sump will make many turnovers if the fluid therein, and larger particles that survive will do their damage.

You could argue that neither size range will be damaging, at which case the arguments are all just academic anyway.

If the engine is shedding wear materials, oci duration doesn’t make a whole lot of difference unless you’re relying on the dispersants, which is a different beast than media filtration.
Particles are there, but at what size and how many is the key, and it's not really the largest particles that cause the most wear. Engine wear due to particulate in the oil is proportional to how clean the oil is and how long that oil is pumped through the engine (the OCI). So length of OCI definitely makes a difference because the longer the OCI the more the contamination level increases. If you ran a low efficiency filter for 10K miles there will be more particulate in the oil vs using a high efficiency filter - ISO 4406 particle count data shows that.

A higher efficiency filter keeps the oil cleaner, and as the OCI gets longer and longer than that becomes more important. For example, that's why big diesel engines use a bypass filtering system, so they can run that oil a very long time and keep it clean throughout the OCI. If you changed oil every 1500 miles on a broken in engine you wouldn't need much filtration beyond a fine screen because you're getting rid of the debris by changing the oil.

If you read some engine wear studies, like the ones done by Cummins you will see that the conclusion is the debris 20u and less contributes to the most wear. An oil filter rated at 99% @ 20u is typically around 70-80% @ 5u, so it's going to filter out way more debris below 20u than a filter that's rated at 99% @ 45u. Low efficiency oil filters also shed way more already captured debris than high efficiency filters, as seen in every ISO 45458-12 test. Oil filters lose efficiency as they load up, which is opposite of air filters which will increase in efficiency as they load up. It's been discussed a lot in this forum.

Either you want a good filter to catch more smaller particles, regardless of oci, or you don’t.
I choose higher filtration every time ... why not when oil filters that are 99% @ 20u microns don't cost any more (and sometimes less) than much lower efficiency filters. I'd even run a high efficiency for 3000 miles in that case.
 
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