Severe maintenance: Cold weather and short drives. How to keep your Ej25 running strong.
Hey!... Welcome to the final #modmonday of 2019! We bring 2019 to an end with EJ25 turbo maintenance #modmonday. Today we will talk about the oil change maintenance and why it is especially important to during the winter months and short distance drives.
This nasty oil water mess is often to find its way into my Grimmspeed Aos due to my frequent short trips during the cold months.
During the cold winter months I find myself barely getting my car to operating temperature before I arrive at work. With this comes condensation, which dilutes your oil and will cause engine wear due to lack of lubrication. This is something cold temps and short drives will do to every motor but lets talk a bit about why its tougher on the turbo Ej25.
This metal tubing being located so far away from the hot engine is one of the worst culprits. Being that the cold winter air flows through the hood scoop non-stop it is extremely hard to get this thing warm to the touch.
At idle and during short in town drives your coolant will likely stay below 150 degrees fahrenheit, this makes it extremely difficult to burn off any moisture that is housed within the engine or pcv breather hoses. After shutting off the engine the colder breather hoses and warm engine will cause condensation to form and enter the engine oil.
Pcv valve here after a few winter months. This actually seized the Pcv valve, which is not good for anything. Guide to change out your pcv valve here.
My thoughts on this issue have to do with the length of breather hoses, the height above the engine for them, and the hood scoop funneling cold air across the top of the engine and tmic. All these add up to a large temperature indifference between the engine block and breather lines, once again making more condensation that will once again find its way to the oil pan.
The Ej25 is a mess of breather hoses to help keep everything happy. Add an Aos and you have even more lines that are further away from your engine cause moisture to appear. Grimmspeed Aos
With all this said what are ways to combat this issue? Taking a longer drive to and from your destination, this helps increase engine temps to even out temps throughout the engine and hoses. The increased engine temperature can also burn off any water before it causes problems.
Additional if you have a manual car you can use engine braking to help put more vacuum on the engine which can help evaporate the moisture that builds up. You also have the ability to hold a gear a tad longer helping add some extra heat into the mix.
By far the best course of action is to use a quality synthetic oil and change it every three months as dictated by your Subaru owner's manual. Changing the oil at this interval keeps the water from taking over and breaking down the oil. While a high quality synthetic oil will hold it's consistency throughout the oil change interval and is much more stable versus standard oil in similar temps.
Keep up on those oil changes! 3k or 3 months for severe driving. Oil change tips and tricks here!
Another option is a air oil separator that incorporates coolant flowing through it to help negate the temperature differences.
IAG has a feed line to help keep the temperatures in check and more even across each part. Iag Aos
Questions, comments, thoughts? Leave them below