- 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
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to check out Dr.Squatch's best-selling bundles. 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!
