FiatCoupe

Congratulations Dan.

Your posts are always interesting and informative. Keep them coming.

John

Arctic Wolf

Why do you put oil every 1000 miles?

Edgy01

So it won't run out. It is using oil at the rate of 1 quart every 1000 miles. I suppose if I didn't drive the car I would be able to say that it "uses no oil."

Arctic Wolf

Is this something you were supposed to do with every 997 S? I thought if you change the oil twice a year you'd be good?

sandwedge

There's no canned oil formula for these cars. Some use oil, others don't, regardless of how often you change oil or how you drive. I think Edgy's car has used oil since new and here he is, 70K miles later with a strong running car. On the flip side I've read more than once about blown engines with much lower miles than that on cars that burned no oil at all.

96redLT4

Now that was funny! Thank goodness for being able to check it on the dashboard. I think mine has used about 1/2 quart in the first 20K miles. I have been surprised.
Jim

buddy911t

Come on, a car that uses a qrt. of oil every 1000mi is more healthy than a car that uses almost none? I don't buy it.

gonz911

92k on mine and uses no oil. Dealer maintained.

sandwedge

Pretty sure that's not what I said. I said that high miles and high oil consumption doesn't necessarily add up to a vulnerable car while low miles and low oil consumption is no guarantee either.

alexb76

@Dan, I asked this earlier... when (age/miles) did you start losing oil every 1,000 miles? On my '07 with 20K miles I have yet to have any noticable oil consumption.

Edgy01

I drove the car in Europe during the break-in period about 3200 miles. I had to add three quarts of oil while there. (The factory had told me that it would normally need none. I brought a quart with me because I don't believe everything Zuffenhausen says). From then on it still uses roughly a quart every thousand miles. The used a bore-scope to look for a reason (could be either a scratched cylinder wall or an issue with valve guides) and found nothing. This has been discussed several years ago and we concluded that it is simply a bad tolerance stack. Everything that went into that engine was at the limit of its tolerance and the additive effect was to wind up using oil. It had nothing to do with how I broke in the engine, nor how I use the engine. I have spoken to others who have had this issue and some engines simply use oil, period. Fortunately, the occurrence is statistically low for Porsche AG, with about 7-8% of their engines doing this. They really don't know why this happens because if they did they would do what was necessary to resolve it. This is the first Porsche I have ever owned that used oil like this. (This is also not my first new Porsche). I believe what others are suggesting is that oil usage doesn't point to vulnerability with engine life. Years ago I would say that excessive oil consumption dictated time for an upper engine rebuild, and you had the additional indicators like burning oil (smoke) as you drove. Our criteria in those days (air-cooled) was to prepare to do engine work when an engine was taking a quart every 400 miles. (By then it was usually valve guides). Fortunately for me, their engine oil measurement system works extremely well and I have never failed to stay on top of keeping sufficient oil in the case. Some of you may be operating under a false sense of no oil use by driving short distances and having whatever oil use masked by the exchange of that oil lost with water--condensation--that never gets hots enough to be burned off. If you ever develop a lot of sludge on the bottom of your oil filler cap then you are probably a victim of too much moisture in your engine.

mgordon18

This amount of oil usage brings up an interesting thought... You're effectively changing over all the engine oil on a constant rotating basis every 9000 miles.

If you're going through that much oil, why would you ever do an actual full oil change? Is there a way to replace the oil filter without draining the whole engine? Are there some other benefits to draining the whole thing down?

USMC_DS1

You can remove the oil filter housing to replace the oil filter. ~0.4 qtrs of oil will dump out. You should replace all the oil, however, to remove any metals and/or contaminates within the old oil. Fuel additives, for example, will add chemicals which are potentially harmful to the engine oil overtime especially as they accumulate with each additive treatment.

Edgy01

I probably have the cleanest oil in any 997 based upon this turnover!

r6bruin

I notice even manual says some oil consumption is consider normal, however I can never figure if there is no leak, where those oil went...