You have absolutely no idea what your talking about. The device measures the levels of acidity, carbon depositis, moisture and a few other impurities. And it works, no matter how little you know about it. Silly nonsense babble.
Changing oil annually is only a precaution, like preventive maintenance. Granted, it can pick up moisture over the winter but even that shows on the tester. Oxidation is less of a problem than people think.
For whatever its worth, taxicabs routinely use oil monitoring and not specific intervols for oil changes. (And that's some of the most severe use on the road.
Actually taxis engines have a fairly easy life because most are on the road 24/7 and the engines rarely cool down completely .
I used to drive cabs & the ones I drove would be lucky to be stationary for more than an hour a day .
Crawling through almost stationary traffic is not great, but no where near as destructive as jumping into an ice cold car a flying off to work course you are running a bit late.
And on top of that most cab drivers by virtue of the fact they do it all day every day actually know how to drive in heavy traffic .
Then, because down time costs a lot of money, most are serviced a whole lot better than your average car.
During my studies I worked at the Defence Materials Lab where I learned more about oils that I would ever need to know in private life.
We pioneered most of the oil analysis techniques used world wide and two of these pioneers were my bosses .
Your device that is no longer sold ( which speaks volumes for it's accuracy ) was a con from day one and I do know what I am talking about .
It is a slightly modified DVM that does nothing but measure the resistance of the oil .
Moisture content for example can only be determined by heating the oil to its working temperature ( around 80C for a car engine ) on a balance till it achieves a constant weight.
The vapour given off is then condensed and also weighed.
A more sofisticated method is to heat at the known vapour point for the volatile contaminants till a constant weigh is achieved, noting the weight before going to the next higher temperature.
Again the vapour is condensed weighed then chemically analysed.
But if you want to believe in your do-hickey then go ahead
It is your engines that are at risk, not mine .
We determined when oil needed changing by doing a proper analysis and we correlated what we found in the oil to actual measured wear inside the engines ( mainly turbo prop , helicopter patrol boat , frigate & tank engines )
That was free carbon , oxygen demand ( determines how much anti oxidants are still active ) .
That was followed by specific gravity testing .
Samples were then heated to specific temperature to volatalise different things that may be present such as fuels & water.
After that a flame cromograph got used to determine what elements were in the oil, specifically iron nickel & chrome for engine wear & zinc sulphur & phos for boundary lubrication
Following this x-ray diffraction to determine what molecules of engine materials were present & some of the molecules of the oil so we could determine what was wearing, top ring, second ring, oil scraper, linner, valve guide, cam follower, cam , etc etc etc.
Then atomic adsorbtion spectrometry to pull all of the trace elements like phos , sulphur , manganise & molly
Then there was centrifuging at various G levels to separate solids of different specific gravities
After that it went into the wet chemical lab which was a place I did not have security clearance to enter.
My actual duties were to prepare the sample for X-ray diffraction then analyse the results, which is a fancy way of saying look for the Millers indicies of alloys known to be present .
The mechanical physics section did all of the bulk property testing, viscosities , 3 ball & cup testing , smear testing , viscious friction , thin film strength , frothing , detergency . etc plus a whole pile of stuff that does not come to mind right now.
They tested both the fresh oils and the dirty oil where as the section I was in tested only used oils with the objective of using oil analysis to determine when engines needed work, rather than tear downs at specific operational hours.
We did some cutting fluids, transformer oils & explosives as well.
A really interesting place to work but due to the politics of the Vietnam war there were massive budget cuts once the withdrawls were announced so no full time job for yours truly , the technology go sold off to private enterprise and most of the scientific staff got sacked, many of which moved to the USA & UK to set up similar programes.
If you look at the scientific staff at Blackstone you will find a lot of Aussies came there in the late 70's & early 80's
So apart from oil company engineers & chemist, I would hazard to guess I have probably forgotten more about oils than most on this list will ever know .
