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Oil Tests

money_pit_yj

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Oct 28, 2013
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Collierville, Tn
When I worked at the Coop we had an oil supplier who was adamant about running oil tests on vehicles in high stress situations. Do any of you run oil tests and do you have any experiences where knowing what the results were saved you money? How often do you run them?
 
I'll give you my experience. I have saved a little bit of money by never doing an oil test. Of course I dont run fleet vehicles and since I have never lost an engine in any vehicle I have owned I dont think the test results would have changed anything either. Probably different in a commercial situation though.
 
My Grandpa has a fleet of vehicles, never lost an engine and never had any major engine trouble. Several vehicles with over 500k and plenty of vans with 2-300k.
Change the oil at 5k miles constantly and never have done an oil test.

Thats just our experience, I have heard that some companies test at certain intervals and if nothing shows up they will continue without performing a service up to a certain length like say 20k miles. I dont know if the service savings offset the oil testing that much in the end though.
 
We are low mileage but high stress situations. Once a truck gets to my fleet it will haul fertilizer and chemicals on short trips for 4 months a year then get parked for 8 months. Most of our trucks get serviced once a year because we may only put 10k miles. I would love to get a pre and post season service for every truck. I just hate seeing a location put a $12,000 motor in a $20,000 truck when we will beat the chassis to death.
 
i run them at random throughout the life of a vehicle, maybe 2-3 tests, just to see how things are wearing, if antifreeze or excessive metals, fuel etc are present etc. never had an issue. No need for more than that in my opinion
 
My company runs a oil test at every oil change on every truck, we run 40,000 miles between oil changes, a brand new Pete will get its first oil change at 25,000 then it's every 40,000. My truck usually uses about 2 gallon of oil between services, my old Pete had a cat engine and with a million miles would burn 4 gallon usually and on stock engine, if we pull a sample with metal that truck goes to auction unless it's under warranty


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Oil analysis is a great way to monitor component wear be it an engine or transmission or other system. The key is to get a baseline of the system and then test at a given interval and look patterns. Elevated counts of silica would indicate dirt being introduced into the system. Elevated iron would indicate gear or bearing wear. Brass for things like synconizers or hydraulic pump rotating assemblies.
The O.P. stated the trucks are services once a year. In that case if you serviced the engine or component prior the the start of the season, analysis would show last years wear.
If the trucks were serviced more than once a year a better pattern could be obtained. Annalisis is only as good as the data collected. If the serviceman is not performing the work in a clean manner the samples could be contaminated and erroneous data collected.
I have seen service work on engines looking for fuel in the oil and find out the serviceman was using fuel to clean the oil sample puller. Not a good situation at all.
Basically the more samples that are pulled the better a pattern of wear is documented. Once a year would be hard to catch a failure before it happens but could help I am sure.
 
I did an oil analysis test every other oil change on my QSM11 Cummins engines on my charter boat , shell rotella T5 seemed to gave the best copperious numbers I changed the oil at 250-300 hours .it will let you no the internal wear on bearings rings etc..everyday use I would only do once a year ..my engines had 17,000 hours on tare down.they say 11,000 hour engines , and bearings were like new and cylinders still had the honing groves.. Cummins midsouth said we should've buttoned it back up ..my point is good OIL and FILTER is the key .regularly oil changes is the life on diesels ....
 

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