- Engine oils are like religions.
You've got the house of Valvoline, the church of Pennzoil,
Quaker State.
(children booing)
And when I was doing my research for this episode
I quickly found out for whatever reason
that engine oil is a polarizing topic.
So when I was browsing the aisles of my local dollar store
and I came across this budget oil, I got curious.
What is this mystery oil that costs the same
as a four-pack of Fruit Stripe gum.
Well today, we're gonna figure it out,
we're going to talk about engine oils,
what's inside the cheap stuff and see how it compares
to the top shelf oil and while we're at it,
we're going to see who here at Donut has the dirtiest oil
pumping through their engine.
Is it me?
Nope.
(lighthearted music)
- Big thanks to Dr.Squatch for sponsoring this episode.
(laughter)
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You are mythical.
- Engine oil is pretty important
for your engine. (upbeat music playing)
If you take two chunks of metal
and you try to get them to slide on each other,
it doesn't work,
the coefficient of friction between those two surfaces
is high enough to prevent them from slipping.
But when we add engine oil into the mix
it creates a thin film that separates the metal surfaces
and allows the parts to move.
This is what's going on in your engine.
You have a bunch of metal components moving around
that need that layer of oil in between them
so that they can function properly.
Now, not only is the oil there to lube stuff up,
it's also there to clean your engine
as well as cool it down.
Now, I'm going to be honest,
I once thought a long time ago
that oil was just rotted dinosaurs, but in fact,
crude oil was formed millions of years before T-Rex
and his little claws were stomping around.
See this used to be a big old ocean, right?
And the animals and plant life that we're living
in that ocean when they died, they fell to the bottom of it.
And when they decomposed, they turned into a sludge,
which is basically just carbon and hydrogen atoms.
Well over millions and millions of years,
sand and silt would build up on top of that sludge
and it created so much pressure and heat that it turned it
into a crude oil, which is just a bunch of hydrocarbons.
Well what we have behind me are what called pump jacks,
and they take that crude oil
and they bring it up to the earth's surface.
And that crude oil is then shipped off to a refinery
where it's made into all sorts of stuff like gasoline,
like diesel, jet fuel,
and even formulated into engine oil.
And when crude oil is refined,
it's put back under high heat and pressure,
and when you do that, you can separate the light
and heavy hydrocarbons.
Now a hydrocarbon, that's just a chain of carbon
and hydrogen atoms, that's all this stuff is.
So the light hydrocarbons, they're pulled off and refined
to make fuels like gasoline and diesel,
and the heavier hydrocarbons, they're used for base oils.
- And the three big components that you use
in an engine oil to control things is the base oil,
which is about 85% of the formulation.
That gives you your lubrication and your viscometrics.
You then have your additives,
which is the most expensive part
kind of like the active ingredient if you will.
That brings in wear protection,
it brings in sludge control, it brings an oxidation control
so your oil doesn't break down.
And the last thing is viscosity modifiers,
which are polymers,
which basically ensure that as your oil heats up,
it doesn't thin out too much.
- This is Dr. Michael Warholic who holds a PhD
in fluid mechanics and is the technology manager
for Valvoline.
Now given that he says 85% of an oil starts
with its base oil,
we should probably figure out what this stuff is.
Well luckily, the American Petroleum Institute
or API for short, they categorize base oils
into five main groups.
Now this breakdown is based on the refining method
and the base oils' properties.
How much sulfur the oil contains,
its saturate level and its viscosity index.
And from those three properties we can create a chart
that breaks down our five base oils.
Groups one, two, and three, they're conventional oils,
meaning they're refined from crude oil,
all that frickin' dyno juice that's under the ground.
Group three is the best
because it has the lower sulfur content,
it's got the highest saturate level,
and it's got a high viscosity index.
Now on the other hand, we have groups four and five
and they are synthetic based oils,
meaning they're synthesized in a lab, they're manmade.
Group four oils are made from Polyalphaolefin,
also called PAOs,
and group five based oils are also chemical-engineered oils.
Typically, when it comes to the engine oil game at least,
they're not used as a base oil,
they're just used as an additive to other base oils.
Now, as you go up the ladder,
the better functioning the base stock is
and the higher price you pay for the final oil formulation.
Well kind of.
A company can label an oil as synthetic here in the USA
making you think you got a group four base stock,
but really it's conventional oil.
In fact, the term fully synthetic is nothing more
than a marketing ploy.
We're not gonna go down that route,
that's like a little bit too wheelhousey for us.
Maybe Nolan will do something about it.
Anyways, my point is, is that if you start off
with a lower grade base stock,
the oil is going to be cheaper,
like a dollar per bottle cheap.
But that cheap price comes with a trade off.
- Because the base soil is really the foundation
that you're building your house on, right?
So, the better base oil that you have,
the better performance that oil is going to give you,
and actually, the more you can do on the additive side.
- But why is using a lower tier base stock worse
when it comes to using it in your engine?
Well, conventional oils like this,
they're a mix of different hydrocarbon molecules
that are non-uniform.
The refining process,
it didn't separate out different sized molecules
and as a result,
you get a lubricant with different shapes and sizes.
That's important to know because the difference in size
creates an oil that creates an irregular lubricant surface.
If you were to zoom in with a microscope
and check out that layer of oil
in between your two metal surfaces,
you'd see some height differences there,
and these various sized molecules, they generate friction
within the fluid.
That then causes your engine to need more power
to overcome that added friction.
Now on the other hand, hello.
Because group four oils are manmade,
they don't have these molecular problems.
The scientists making these oils,
they can control that molecular structure
to achieve whatever functional properties the oil is after.
Now this molecular uniformity creates a size uniformity
meaning all the molecules are the same shape and size.
Because of this, they have a broader temperature range,
they have better protection at high temps,
and they lack that higher friction within the fluid
making them more efficient.
So today we are going to put our dollar-store oil
through some homegrown bench testing and see how it fares
to some top-shelf Valvoline.
And if you're wondering, why are we using Valvoline?
Well it's because they're the (beep) best.
And also, we just so happen to have a partnership
with them here at Donut,
we just got a bunch of it around the shop,
they didn't sponsor this episode.
So whatever happens happens.
And before all you oil hoes get all testy with me
and ask me, "Hey, why didn't you test this oil or that oil?"
Really, I'm only trying to find out more
about this dollar-store oil.
We're just using some of these other more well-known brands
for context.
Now that being said,
we've decided to use the same weight oil in our evaluation,
10W-30, apples to apples, we're not going to switch it up.
They're going to be all 10W-30 baby.
So first things first, I need to make sure this oil
says what it actually is, 10W-30.
So how would I go and do that?
Well, I'm going to go off and send a virgin oil sample
to get analyzed by an oil analysis lab.
So the lab doing this analysis, they'll do a verify test
for viscosity and report back a number
and if that number falls in between the ranges
as defined by the test,
then we'll know that Drivers Choice isn't lying.
You could also just look at the bottle.
So this little stamp right here is called the API donut
and it identifies engine oils
that meet certain API oil standards.
So if it says 10W-30 on it, the API approves this claim.
But frickin' anybody could just Photoshop that
and print it on this bottle.
So in the meantime,
I'm going to run my own little viscosity experiment here
in the Donut lab.
So we're going to take this oil
and we're going to cool it down as cold as we can get it,
around minus 10 degrees celsius
and then we're going to pour it down our Donut ramp here
and compare it to other 10W-30 oils and see how it fares.
This will give us an idea if this Drivers Choice oil
is even in the ballpark of other 10W-30 oils.
So I have the synthetic Valvoline,
the conventional Valvoline, and our Drivers Choice
all in 10W-30 weight.
So we're going to pour it down this ramp
and I'm going to see how our Drivers Choice compares
to these other two oils.
Let's see what happens.
Mmh.
- Synthetic-- - Wins.
Okay, that's pretty interesting.
It looks like the lower temperature range of oil is on par
with these other two, but a virgin oil sample,
that's not all that telling, right?
What's more important is if we look at the oil
once it's been heat cycled and used a little bit.
Engine oil begins to break down
at around 275 degrees Fahrenheit.
So I'm going to heat up this oil to that temperature
then cool it back down to around minus 10 degrees
and run the same test to see if we maintain
our 10-weight spec after the oil went past
its normal operating temperature.
Let's see what happens.
Oh, oh it's so close.
Oh!
So the purpose of this test wasn't to determine
a winner or a loser per se,
it was just to see whether or not this 10W-30
Drivers Choice oil was in the ballpark
of some other 10W-30 oils, and it turns out it is,
and it is when you heat it up, it is when you cool it down,
it's in that general range.
So it's probably safe to say that if it says 10W-30 on it,
it is.
We're also going to do an evaporation test.
To do that, I'm going to weigh out a set amount of oil,
each of our three oils,
I'm going to put it on a hot plate,
I'm going to crank it up to 150 degrees C
and I'm going to let it sit there for 30 minutes.
I'll then take it off the hot plate
and then put it back on the scale
and see how much oil has evaporated in that time.
So as you can see here, our dollar store oil evaporated off
1.39 grams over that course of 30 minutes,
which is around 2.76% of the total starting volume.
Now that's right on par with these other two oils,
the Valvoline conventional and Valvoline synthetic,
which means that this dollar-store oil is in the ballpark
of these other 10W-30 oils.
Now we can confirm that this is a 10W-30 oil
on the practical side of things, but what about chemically?
What happens when we use a more scientific method
like spectroscopy to find out what's going on
inside this oil?
Now doctor Warholic mentioned that
there are a few other components outside of the base stock
that determine the quality of the oil,
that's the additives and the viscosity modifiers.
So if you start out with crude oil,
you refine it into your base oil,
and then you add additives, that's what gets you engine oil.
And luckily with our report in hand,
we can look at what additives
and how much of each of these additives are inside
our oil sample.
So here I have a printed out report of our Drivers Choice
dollar-store oil, and if you look at it,
they have a bunch of different elements
on the left-hand side
and a bunch of different numbers
corresponding to those elements.
Now we have 22 elements,
each of them telling us a different thing about our oil.
Now because this is a virgin oil sample
meaning we haven't run it through an engine,
there's not going to be any values next to our metals,
but there are some values next to our additives.
So we have boron, calcium, magnesium, and barium,
these are detergents.
We have molybdenum, phosphorus, zinc,
these are anti-wear agents.
And when we look at these oils side by side,
our dollar-store oil has comparable values
for all of these additives, which is a pretty good thing.
So the purpose of additives is they improve the performance
of your base oil.
The manufacturer of a bunch of different oils,
they can take the same base stock for each formulation
and then choose different additives
for their specific application.
And in some oils, the additives make up 5% of the weight
of the oil.
In modern engines, they got to have additives in there.
Without them, the oil would become contaminated,
the oil would break down, it'd leak out
and would not properly protect the engine parts
at all operating temperatures.
Now these are your detergents and they clean the metal parts
in your engine and prevent a bunch of sludge and stuff
from building up.
And these right here, these are your anti-wear agents,
and they do, surprise surprise, exactly that,
they prevent items like your valves from wearing out
and creating gaps that oil can then get past
in what's called blow by.
And this right here, this is an important number,
this is called your TBN.
So TBN, it measures how much base additive is in the oil
to offset the effects of acids coming in to the oil
from the combustion process and the wear of metal.
So your engine oil has a set pH
and when it's running through your engine over time,
it gets more acidic as it goes along.
The combustion process creates acid in your oil.
The lower the TBN reading,
the less active additive the oil has left.
So that was a great segue into looking at who here at Donut
has the worst oil.
(humming)
(upbeat music playing)
(upbeat music continues)
So I have six reports in my hand.
We got Zach's GX470, we have my GX470,
we have Kanan's Ford Ranger, we have Nolan's Mustang,
we have Kristina's Prius, and we have Eddie's Miata.
Now let's get down to brass tacks
and see who's got fricking worst oil
out of all these six people.
Now that do that,
I'm going to focus on the bottom of this report
and we're going to start with the TBN value.
Now it just so happens that I have the lowest TBN value,
which is an indicator that my oil is old.
But I do have to say I took a sample of my GX470's oil
when I bought it.
So this isn't when I was operating the vehicle,
it's when the person before me.
So it's got a low TBN value, but still it's pretty good,
it's above the minimum value of one, which is what you want.
Who has the highest TBN is frickin' Nolan.
Goes to,
no, sorry, it doesn't go to Nolan.
Sorry Nolan, it goes to Eddie spaghetti, which makes sense
because Eddie actually recently changed his oil.
He's got fresh old oil in there.
Now other things we can look at
to determine how old the oil is
is looking at the percent of water.
Everyone on here, it's got 0% water, that's great.
We can also look at the percent of antifreeze.
Everyone here has a 0% antifreeze, which is also good.
We can look at the insoluble percentage,
and that's the amount of solids that have formed
due to oxidation,
and the person who's got the worst one in that is a tie
between Kanan and Nolan.
Two more things we can look at is the viscosity
and the flashpoint,
the lower the flashpoint, the older the oil is.
The viscosity, the lower the viscosity also,
the more that oil has broken down over time,
and we if put all those factors into play
we can determine who needs to change their engine oil.
And that goes to,
drum roll please. (drum roll playing)
Nolan. (cheering)
Nolan, change your engine oil man.
Sorry to throw you under the bus,
that's why I stole your keys.
You probably didn't know I did that
but when you watch this video, you will.
And if you're curious who has the cleanest oil,
it actually turns out to be Kristina, we tied.
So put it there, Tina.
Yeah, we got good fricking engine.
Guys, thank you so much for watching this episode of "B2B."
Thank you, Dr. Warholic for letting me pick your brain,
talk about engine oil.
This is the first episode of "B2B" of the new year.
Happy 2021!
Follow us here @Donut on Instagram @DonutMedia.
Follow me on Instagram at Jeremiah Burton.
Until next week, bye for now.
2021 here we come!