Welcome back to truck stuff, and today we’re going to talk about what is one of the biggest Killers to a diesel engine any engine for that matter. There are several and I know, we’re going to see a lot of different comments from people about. No, that’s not the biggest killer, but I got to be honest. I’Ve been working on these for a long time and I’ve seen a lot of bad things about what we’re going to specifically talk about. Today, we’re going to talk about your oil, we’re going to talk about oil, dilution, oil contamination and a couple other things about oil.
First and foremost, I don’t want to make the same mistake as some other people and tell you not to idle your vehicle, because I believe in idling your vehicle there’s a reason why they put a 10-minute timer on your auto start now. Should you idle your vehicle for 30 40 minutes unless you live in the Arctic? No, you shouldn’t, because what you end up with on here is: what’s called oil dilution um. All of the components on the internal assemblies are machined to a tolerance at warm-up temperature and when you’re just idling, and you don’t idle it up – you’re not going to achieve your operating temperature. Therefore, your piston rings aren’t going to close all the way down to where they should um the fitment of the Pistons in the cylinder walls all that good stuff and what happens on especially on a diesel.
Is you end up with byproducts from the combustion chamber whether it’s fuel carbon gases from the EGR, all that crap makes it past those rings and it makes it into the engine oil? Now some people always wondered, especially new diesel owners. When you pull that dipstick, why does that oil look black? The oil looks black because it’s contaminated and diluted now it can be diluted from fuel, I’m not going to get into that whole subject right there. It’S a whole other video that we’re planning on doing sometime in the future, but what we are going to be concerned with is the contaminants.
So every diesel has higher combustion pressures and when you’re running your diesel, all of the contaminants from the combustion process, not all a small percentage, makes it past the Rings and into the oil and there’s where we get with the oil delution and oil contamination. What can we do to fix it? Um? We can’t control the manufacturers of the oil. We can only buy what we know to be the best and what were recommended by the professionals.
Sometimes those recommendations by the professionals doesn’t mean you’re getting the best product for your engine here, specifically at a dealership level, you’re getting exactly what the manufacturer recommends for the engine. Is it the best? No, but it’s going to be more cost worthy than the best I mean. I can’t expect people to always want to go out there and spend $ 400 or500 every time they need to do an oil change on their vehicle, so the maintenance intervals. You know we’ve we’ve talked about this briefly and a couple others, let’s address it a little bit more on this.
The new interval for this beautiful fifth gen right here is 15,000 mil. Now anybody who owns diesel knows that when you pull your dip, stick right after get an oil change, the oil is already dirty. That means you have oil left over in the engine. That’S contaminated and you’re not getting a full drain, it’s impossible to get a full drain. We can do whatever we want, but you’re still going to end up with about a quart left over in the engine.
That’S going to contaminate the new three gallons that go in. So, to get back more on point 15, 18,000 mil on an interval. In my opinion, it’s way too long. You know 5,000 miles, I believe, is a more adequate amount of mileage to prevent oil contamination and oil dilution from causing your internal components to fail. You know we all talked about the fifth gens and about the cam shafts and the hydraulic lifters, with the roller bearings and all that stuff.
Can we minimize the effect of contaminated oil, decreasing the lubricity of the oil and causing the roller lifter failure? I’M sure we can attribute a lot of that to oil dilution and oil contamination. So do I want to see engines coming in that get 15,000? No, I don’t! As a consumer, it’s probably a good selling point from the dealership to say.
Well now you only got to spend 200x amount of dollars every 15,000 mil, so here buy this truck as an owner operator mechanic. No, please do not go 15,000 miles in between oil changes. It’S killing your engines. This is going to be typical, be gentle with me out there in the YouTube land proper way to warm up your diesel on a cold morning. You put your foot on the brake and you hit the button.
It’S going to go through the weight to start, we’ve already driven this a little bit. So it’s warm! We don’t have to worry about that. Then you can come over here and you can turn on your cruise control. You hit the set and then you start raising up your idle.
Get your idle up. There you’re not going to hurt the engine by raising the idle on cold startup and it’s going to keep everything rotating and getting warmer faster so that you can get it up to an operating temperature quicker, thus decreasing the amount of contamination making it past the Rings And into the oil and decreasing the lubricity of the oil, so how long do you let it sit here like this? That’S a that’s a very controversial scenario. You know you hear people say it can sit there and run for 20 minutes. You can only do it for 15 or 20 seconds.
My opinion, the manufacturer, says 10 minutes because that’s exactly when your auto start times out, if you do a remote start, do they actually say specifically in the owner’s manual nowhere that I’ve been able to find and I’ve looked? Maybe somebody out there’s got better eyeballs than me. I don’t know. I need new readers by the way. Just in case you guys want to.
You know, send me a gift. A positive, too super thanks super things, um without dig pring down that whole Rabbit Hole of. How long do you let your diesel warm up for what we’re talking about here is oil contamination and oil dilution, your oil dilution. Again, as we’ve talked about comes from fuel, making it past the the Rings and into the oil and oil contamination is the combustion gases, whether it be from the combustion process or from the EGR system, bringing in dirty exhaust gas and reburning that all of those combined Make it past the Rings and into the oil, and it decreases the oil lubricity and the viscosity, and remember that viscosity changes as the oil becomes contaminated. These engines very specific with a 5 w40 15 w40 pre8.
The whole point of the 5w 40 is so that the oil maintains it’s lubricity in colder weather. Now you guys that live in Florida and Texas and California and stuff you’re at a 10:30. That’S because you don’t see the super cold climates like we do here. So you want to run whatever your manufacturer recommends. If you have a fifth gen, do not run 1540 oil in it you’re going to kill that motor, but back more so to this one right here we want to maintain proper oil change intervals.
You definitely do need to let your vehicle warm up before you just go and drive it. You at least have to get the oil flowing through everything and another thing, while we’re still sitting here on high idle that I want to talk about and it brings in light. You know maintaining your diesel engine since we’re talking about lubricity and oil, and all that good stuff is when you jump in your vehicle to shut it off, like let’s say, you’ve remote started it and the automatic high idle kicked on. Please don’t just hit the start. Button and shut it off.
You need to shut off your cruise control. Let the engine come back down to an idle give it you know 5 seconds, and then you can shut it off. The reason why that is is your turbocharger gets its oil suppli direct from engine oil pressure and, if you’re elevated up on your idle you’re spinning the turbo a little bit faster, then you would be at idle, especially since it’s going through a warm-up process. When you shut the engine off, you shut the oil supply to that turbo off. You’Ve got to let the Turbo spin down to an idle speed before you shut it off same truth can be said that if you’re towing, you just come off the interstate and you pull into the gas station, you have to give it a good 30 seconds or So to let the Turbo come back down to an idle speed and cool down just a little bit because of course, you’re towing.
You don’t want to shut everything off dur ing the height of its temperature Spike, because when you do shut it off you’re going to get a heat soak situation, you don’t want that to have any adverse effects on the oil inside of the turbo. That is now not being circulated and it potentially burning and varnishing on the bearings inside of the turbo so think we’re going to stop beating that rabbit into the bush. I guess I don’t know where I got that from part of a warmup process on a diesel engine is going to be utilizing the block heater. Now not every one of these vehicles comes with the block heater, but every engine manufactured by Cummins, every 67 manufactured by Cummins comes with the block heater already installed. Now the block heater is going to be on the passenger side of the engine and it’s going to be down below the exhaust manifold and down below some oil, suppli cool and supply lines.
We’Re going to stitch a picture into this. The block heater is there. So when you go to the dealer and say you want a block heater added onto your Cummins you’re, only paying for the cord, so you’re going to see on there there’s a silver thing: sticking out of a water jacket with a rubber, a black rubber protector over The end of it that black rubber thing is just a cover to protect the electrical contacts, you can literally go down to the part store and buy a block heater cord for a coming for, like 50 bucks. Add it yourself, of course, routing it back up into the frame and out the front. Bumper can be a little bit tricky sometimes, but it’s not rocket science you’re, not building the engine, you’re adding a cord to it, um plug them in you know it’s not just for the Arctic and not for Canadians to plug in their vehicles.
Eh, it’s for everybody who lives in a colder climate. You want to give your engine it’s best chance of surviving warm-up times, plug them in it’s going to cost you Pennies on the Dollar, on your electric bill to plug in one of these monsters. But it’s going to warm up that oil or the coolant. I should say it’s going to help, keep the whole engine a little bit warmer for those cold, startup mornings. Now back to the whole oil contamination and dilution, thing EGR, exhaust gas, Rec circulation.
What it does is takes a small amount of the raw exhaust from the cylinders redirects it back up through an EGR cooler, because, of course, those exhaust temperatures can get pretty hot if you’re, towing, 1 1400 is not uncommon. It’Ll bring it back through the cooler to help cool it down, go through an EGR divert valve. This thing will open and close to allow the exhaust gas is to actually go towards the intake or stay back here once this opens up. Exhaust gas comes across your EGR tube and then your EGR valve, which will open and close to allow the exhaust gases into the intake. Now, simultaneously, you have a throttle body that will close periodically it’s a pulsewidth modulated valve to either shut off fresh air intake flow or allow EGR gas to go through the engine.
Now, we’ve all seen the videos of people that have showed their EGR valves their intakes. Their air grid heaters just totally carboned up and plugging everything off those are not properly running engines. To be honest with you, yes, the EGR system is dirty. Yes, it does introduce a whole lot of contaminants into the engine, but most of the time, when you see those severely plugged off engines, they’ve either got extremely high idle times or they have injector issues or they’ve just been not negligent on replacing their air filter. I see so many [ __ ] coming in and the whole face that filter is plugged off with bugs and oil and debris from the roads and everything else, just nasty you got to change air filters.
If you don’t, you start choking the motor down. You start choking the motor down you doing bad things to your engine, so replace your air filter decrease your time between oil changes. You know i’ like to see 5000 run. Good quality filters use your high quality oils, at least what the dealer recommends. Don’T walk into the O’Reilly and say I need the cheapest 5w 40.
You have it’s probably not going to be the best for your engine, but better than nothing and proper warm-up times. Proper warm-up procedures must be followed. If you have any questions about your proper warm-up procedure, consult your owner’s manual, it tells you right there not specific times, but what to do plus the vehicles come with the high idle upgrade if yours, if your cumins does not automatically high idle, take it into your Local dealership, they can turn that on it’s not a huge process, um most of the vehicles that don’t have that turned on or vehicles that were sold in warm climates. So there’s another tip for you. Your vehicle came out of Florida.
It doesn’t have that turned on. So, thank you for subscribing or watching and if you do watch and you like my content, Please Subscribe turn on the Bell notifications so that you get updates. Whenever I drop a new video, I try not to overrun too many things left and right cuz. You can only watch me change a Hemi engine so many times, but so be it some people like it, some people, don’t if you have any ideas or you know good content, ideas that I could use to film for you. Let me know, and as soon as I can get one of those vehicles in to give you that content, I will.
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