Hey, Its your truck, do what you want.

Let us know how those 10k oil changes work out for your Rover.

 

I'm only planning to do 2 or 3K miles a year, so it will get changed once a year regardless of mileage.

 

dr mordo: "1) These are extremely dirty engines, so extended oil change intervals are not a good idea."
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I caught my engine sleeping with a Yugo engine last night, that **** will has no shame, your right.

 

I just changed my oil for the first time and ended up using Rotella 15w40 based on everything I've read on the forum here. WOW - I can not believe the difference it has made! Completely different machine now. The engine is smoother and much more quiet and i dare say she has much better performance. I am very happy with my choice.

 

Which oil is best?

IMHO, there is a paranoia surrounding oils and oil changes. I believe the best oil is the one that conforms to the norms, preferably a branded make, and of the correct grade particularly even better if it's for free or relatively cheap or on offer.

In race engines, yep, they need oil changes very, very regularly but there is a marked difference as they are highly stressed, very high revving and very expensive engines to rebuild, eyewateringly expensive, and I used Mobil 1 synthetic and changed the oil and filters every 200 miles.

Today I use a sem-synth Elf, Total or whatever in my dirty, smelly, gritty TD5 diesel and 3.0TD RRS and change oil every 10K with new filters of which there is two (one conventional and one rotor spinner). Similarly, I do the same in all of my diesels including the RRS apart from the Pajero which is 5-6K miles (old technology engine) and filter change every 10K. IMHO anything more frequent or more expensive doesn't actually benefit the engine and merely wastes hard earned cash. Still, as long as it's not my cash why worry.

 

So when I bought my truck the previous owner had been running 5w-30 and the engine sounded like it was about to eject the valve train. I did a lot of research on here and it seamed that everyone agreed that was to light of an oil for our trucks. So the next oil change I put 10w-40 and noticed that the engine ran smoother, sounded better and surprisingly enough got better gas mileage. Well seeing that most of the forum users were running the Rotella I went up to Castrol's 20w-50. The engine still sounded great with this oil but I noticed gas mileage drop. So I went back to 10w-40 got my gas mileage back and have been happy since. I change mine every 5k and use k&n oil filters. 3k oil changes is just wasting money. I used to have a friend that worked for Valvoline and he showed me the different quality test they do on standard as well as synthetic motor oils. What I was really surprised to see is most of their conventional oils won't start breaking down til after 6k, and the synthetics closer to 8-9k. But to each and every person I say do whatever floats your boat. As for me and mine I'm going to stick to my castrol GTX 10w-40 changed every 5k.

 

Just to save you reading upthread, the reason for Rotella is the detergent package it contains. High in ZDDP, etc, made for cleaning diesel engines.

Castrol GTX is nice but it is not cleaning your engine every time you use it.

I agree with Russrat above, If you don't notice the difference, you're not paying attention.

 

I recently read an article in one of the LR mags where they interviewed a Rover V8 rebuild guru whose stated opinion was that "old. Style engines need old style oil". The V8 is a 60 year old design and his opinion was that a good quality 20W50 was good for most conditions as long as you changed it and the filter no later than 5000 miles.
Synthetic was not needed, he said.

I tend to agree

 

"Old style oil" had higher levels of ZDDP, which is an additive that prevents wear on flat tappet camshafts. Due to the increased use of roller camshafts and the fact that ZDDP may damage catalytic converters, modern oils have far less ZDDP than older formulations.

The only common modern oils with high levels of ZDDP are diesel oils. That's why we recommend them.

That said, I wouldn't run 20w-50 because it likely doesn't have the higher levels of ZDDP found in a diesel oil. My vehicles run noticeably smoother with synth oil, so that's what I run. Also, when I got my truck it had dino oil with 5000 miles on it, and that was some of the nastiest, dirtiest oil I have ever seen. I have since run synth oil for 6000 miles and when drained it was clean enough that I was tempted to put it back in.

 

Ok Dave03S, let's put the Rotella to the test. I already know about the extra detergents in the oil. But next oil change I will use the Rotella. I have an app called Automatic, works on my iPhone that calculates mpg, miles driven and tells me what my engine codes are. I will use it to measure mpg after the change with rotella and if it gets better mpg I will start using it regularly. If not I will go back to my Castrol Gtx.