Oil analysis or fixed oil change, 2 ways to use the nitiFilter

Drain only when necessary

Since the beginning of the project, we have been recommending to our clients to carry out oil analysis at oil change intervals :

1. to carry out drain only when it is really necessary
2. to have an idea about the health of their engine and to proceed to preventive maintenance before suffering a serious breakdown – for example, coolant leaks, abnormal wear, fuel dilution, etc. can be detected very well.

For the first point, it is obviously the DNA of XFP: to offer pragmatic solutions having the maximum ecological and economic impact, immediately, by forgetting the bad reflexes of automatic unnecessary operations. We are therefore a bit of a stickler : as long as the oil analysis does not show a significant degradation of the oil properties or an excessive contamination, we do not see any real justification to perform an oil change: the oil change interval should not be fixed but adapted to the engine condition..

The second point is part of the best practices  by many professionals, the oil analysis. An analogy can be made – oil for the engine is what blood is to the body: essential to its proper working, but seldom the cause of its malfunction. However, a good analysis can detect the actual or potential causes of its problems. We therefore recommend to regularly perform an oil analysis on engines equipped with nitiFilter® – some of our customers prefer to do it on a very regular basis (every month for example) to detect any anomaly as soon as possible – in order to reduce equipment downtime. By design, oil analysis is very quick to perform with our system because part of the circuit is accessible (return to the purifier and then to the crankcase): it is almost a no-shutdown operation.

Adapt the oil change interval to the maintenance organization

But in our experience, some clients, including professionals, tell us that they do not systematically perform these analyses :

• because they are so confident in the nitiFilter®, both in its role of optimal filtration and protection of the engine in case of severe damage, that they do not feel the need to be as rigorous in monitoring
• or because they prefer not to have any maintenance operations at all, however small. This is of course perfectly justified, not only because the customer is king, but simply because introducing different processes for different vehicles can lead to unwelcome complexity in fleet management. Moreover, the oil analysis operation is so trivial that it is not always interesting to carry out this analysis, e.g. if the workshop is located far from the place where the car or truck is used.

Thus, it may be relevant, although slightly sub-optimal, to return to a fixed drain interval, but obviously significantly lengthened: in general, we start with one drain out of three. This is obviously a less extended draining interval than what our customers generally manage to do (one drain out of five or even one drain out of six), but it is already a significant gain: do you know of many products, available right now and not in an idealized future, which allow you to reduce the use of resources by 3, while providing you with a rapid return on investment (from 3 draining intervals)?