Is sending your used oil to a lab useful?

[Dennis McAtee]

I found a lab that will test your used oil and let you know certain things about it. Is that useful as to knowing how your engine is doing or what kind of shape it is in? They charge twenty five dollars for the test.

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[Lorrin Barth]

I hang out on another forum for modified cars and owners there use this service a lot. This rather amuses me because a two liter engine making 600 hp is going to pop long before oil becomes an issue.

Unless you are a traveling salesman and put on only highway miles the use of your vehicle is considered severe service. Severe service for my DD requires oil changes every 3750 miles. Since the math for some multiple of 3750 mile is too hard for my head I change oil every 3000 miles. With that frequency I don’t think an oil analysis is going to tell me much.

This is just my opinion but I think engines like clean oil not oil that still has useful ingredients at 7000 miles but is otherwise black as tar.

[Bill]

A lab is useful in some situations such as a suspect coolant leak into the oil or an engine noise that may deposit metal into the oil but other than that I wouldn’t bother.

Large trucking companies make use of labs because a diesel truck holds a lot of oil and it gets black in a very short time. They have the oil tested to maximize the time/mileage interval before an oil change.

It saves them money in the long run.

[Nathan]

Believe it or not..

Sending your oil to a lab can be EXTREMELY useful for several things. This is something that is done regularly for large, and even small scale fleet operations..once again that is for several reasons.

All metals break down. It’s just inherent of all things in ‘our’ universe. Certain parts within an engine are tempered from different metals and materials. A good example would be a piston and connecting rod. Both are made of similar metals, but they are not always from the same forgery, nor are they forged of the exact same materials.
As these metals break down over continued operation inside one of the most destructive places on planet earth, they deposit molecular sized pieces of themselves into the oil. Sometimes they are larger then molecules, but that’s a different subject. If your engine oil can touch it, then I can assure you it’s in your oil. Over time there will be a good sized collection of dissimilar metals chillin’ in your oil pan.

Now depending on the size of the lab, and the quality of the work they do as well as the skill and experience of those performing the lab work- they can tell you exactly whats going to fail next, down to the cylinder bank, and how soon you have before the part fails. Their accuracy also depends (alot actually) on how many samples you give them over X amount of time.

This is a common practice for large fleets. It makes life on the Technicians SO much easier having the knowledge that the vibrations from that Ford E250 are coming from a crankshaft lobe that’s going to fail within 700 hours, and not the engine mount as was previously thought…

25$ is a damn good price too. Almost questionable.
Go for it I say. Just be aware that over time, (unless your a M1 full-synthetic type of guy) its going to get expensive to send some away after every oil change.

[Paul]

I’ve wanted to have my oil analyzed, but the cost is comparable to an oil change for me (DIY, periodic sale on oil).

Just1Tech: $25 may seem low, but it’s not unreasonable for the test. The lab probably uses a highly automated process for the metal concentrations. A batch of samples is loaded into an autosampler, the instrument performs a multi-element analysis measurement, and the software processes the data. Basically, set it and forget it.

[Author]

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