PennZoil Oil Burning

I do recall the post, but I only have aged personnel experience with Pennzoil.
I used to use it in the late 70's and early 80's; until I did an oil change on my old 1.5L Honda. Was using straight 30 wt oil @ 5K miles intervals. It drained out like it was 0wt or 5 wt oil. I may have gotten a bad batch and Pennzoil probably upped their game by now; but I mainly stick to Castrol or Mobile1. In 40 years, this hasn't happened to me again.

Hope this helps..

 

You don't say anything about mileage? I'm at 330 or so K miles. And then about 2,000 mi I go from being on the full part of the stick down to the lower line I don't see any oil leaking I don't see it coming out of any of the known areas generally plaguing the NZ engine nothing My tailpipe is not terribly sooty or any of that so I just generally stopped looking there's nothing on the ground under the car the engine is ridiculously clean I keep all of my engines this way and I've never seen any seepage from this engine I don't see any smoke nothing it's all very boringly normal. So I guess it's just from internal wear and age that I'm using oil and now I've relegated to using cheap oil so it's not costing me very much to just top it up and keep going I did this with a KE Corolla back in the early '70s put $400,000 miles on that car and didn't change the oil for over 10 years It was using similar to what my Prius is using now and every 3 weeks or two weeks or whatever it is for tanks of gas I just top up the oil with new stuff out of a bottle and keep getting it as long as I don't see any coaking or build up under the cap in the valve cover whatever no worries that Corolla that I did this with at 400k was still silver light brown looking through the oil hole at the rockers in the top end of the engine The splash way and the return ways for the oil we're all silver and clean at 400k when I put that two TC engine down.

 

That's wild mio 9 didn't start this until 220K possibly a little later up until that mileage didn't use a drop of oil nothing It was so boring of a vehicle It was almost pathetic No out-of-pocket anything except for gas tires a 12 volt battery every so often which wasn't even that often and then all of a sudden around the time the battery started to fail the HV battery the oil consumption started to go up nothing drastic and that's it so now in about between 13 and 1600 mi I'll go from the top of the full line on the stick down to the bottom of the crosshatch line and I just top up and keep getting it It's not worth it for me to put an engine in this car It's not that bad yet and probably by the time it does get that bad I'll be near 600k and everything else on the car will be pretty much ready to go even though it's a work vehicle we still need upholstery on the seats to sit on and things like that

 

I doubt very much that any (good quality) oil works any better than any other. Certainly, there are a lot of anecdotes that say changing from 10W-XX --> 5W-XX --> 0W-XX improved their respective miles per gallon. This could make sense given the thinner cold weight gets oil flowing quicker on startup.

However, I think the best bang for your buck is to do a piston clean (on the assumption your oil ring is gummed to some degree or another), and, in that vain, you might consider using an engine oil flush in your oil just before changing the oil, also with the same aim of ungumming a stuck oil-ring on the piston. This would be done for four or five successive changes with maybe a shortened interval (1200 miles?) for the first few.

Just my 2¢ worth.

 

A quart every 3K miles? That is not bad. A quart every 500 miles is.

 

I would have thought that sticking rings are a more likely source of oil usage than "wear". Assuming of course the motor has never been run with very low, or very dirty, oil. There are all sorts of snake oil treatments for stuck rings, and anecdotally one of them will work once in a while. The reliable fix is also the expensive one - take the motor apart, clean the pistons, and put on new rings. Unless you can do all of that yourself, it usually works out to be cheaper to keep pouring oil into the car. (If so, the oil filter still needs to be changed at the normal intervals, or sooner, even if 10 qts of clean oil has gone in by 5K miles.)

 

Yes, of course. Was it established this car was "worn"?

Hence the cheap suggestion that, anecdotally, works sometimes. Doing something that might work and having it work certainly beats doing nothing just because it might not work.

 

If the problem is Pennzoil oil, breaking-down and not holding it's stated weight during operations - changing oil brands will fix the problem. At least slow it down.
If the problem is sticky piston rings, changing oil brand won't do anything
I think it's a little bit of both issues. My old 2012 PriusC started burning a bit of oil around 85K miles. Moving to 5w20 oil cut the consumption in half. It doesn't get below freezing too often around here; so I didn't have an issue going a little thicker.

 

Regarding the ring issue, is there any reason to think that a full synthetic oil might be better than a traditional oil or a mixed oil? Maybe not in terms of fixing an existing condition, but at least in terms of preventing it in the first place?

 

My old 2012 PriusC always got full synthetic 0W20 - at least whenever I changed the oil.

 

I wouldn't think that any of the types would be better than another in and of itself. It would really depend on what detergents were part of the additive mix for a particular oil. I would expect that new versions of any brand would be better, but have no reason to say that is true except for the hopeful belief that that is the case. I would expect that using an oil with a good detergent added would help keep the engine clean if used from the get-go. My experience is that if the engine has accumulated some gumming then in addition to changing to a good oil, you need to do some preemptive cleaning with engine flush until you see a decrease in lost oil. With the two cars I look after, that has been the case for me.

Rather than type it out again, here is a post I made in another thread where I shared my experience and use of engine flush additives if that is of interest.