Hey uncle Scotty!
Just saw this new Castrol GTX 20w50 & Castrol GTX Essentials 20w50. Dunno the difference from the two, but they're both conventional mineral oil. Is it much better to use 20w50 for our old 1997 Toyota Corona with a 166,000+kms? Especially while living here in the Philippines where it's mostly 30c° and above?
Thank you!
20w/50 sounds too thick. I think the recommendation is for 5w/30.
20W-50 is certainly too thick for your car, even considering the hot weather. I wouldn't go above 10W-30 on it.
These numbers (XXW-YY) represent the viscosity indexes of multi-grade oil, where XX is the "cold" and YY "hot" index. You DON'T WANT to raise the cold index above what your car's manufacturer says is recommended, because it'll put a lot more stress on your engine and oil pump and even may fail to properly lubricate the engine until it gets hot enough. You MAY use an oil with lower cold viscosity index in colder areas, but that's irrelevant in your case. 🙂
The best way to find out the right oil viscosity for your use case is to check the manufacturer's recommendations on oil thickness and then check the oil temperature in your engine while the car is running (could be done with an OBD-II scanner on some cars). If the temperature in your case is higher than what's specified in the car/engine documentation, you can try using an oil with higher "hot" viscosity index (e.g. XXW-40 instead of XXW-30), but even then I'd recommend checking and servicing the cooling system first.
Check out this video for details.
I appreciate this, thank you! Very informative! 😊🙏🏽
For a reference, it can easily get up to +35°C (and sometimes even +45°C) during summer here in eastern Siberia, and we're perfectly fine running our cars on 5W-30 and 5W-40 (and sometimes even 5W-20 and 10W-30) oil. 🙂 Just make sure you change it often enough, especially if we're talking about mineral (aka conventional) oil.
Very interesting! Thanks again! 😊
I recommend sticking with whatever oil the manufacturer recommends.
